A Grammar of the English Language 2015 PDF

A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 HANOI UNIVERSITY ENGLISH DEPARTMENT NGỮ PHÁP TIẾNG ANH A GRAMMAR OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE LÊ HUY TRƯỜNG, M.A., EDITOR ĐẶNG ĐÌNH THIỆN, M.Ed. TRẦN HUY PHƯƠNG, M.Ed....

A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 HANOI UNIVERSITY ENGLISH DEPARTMENT NGỮ PHÁP TIẾNG ANH A GRAMMAR OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE LÊ HUY TRƯỜNG, M.A., EDITOR ĐẶNG ĐÌNH THIỆN, M.Ed. TRẦN HUY PHƯƠNG, M.Ed. (In lần thứ ba có bổ sung và sửa chữa) -1-  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 Lời nói đầu Cuốn sách ngữ pháp này được biên soạn nhằm cung cấp cho sinh viên những hiểu biết cơ bản về một số xu hướng nghiên cứu ngữ pháp như: ngữ pháp chuẩn tắc, ngữ pháp miêu tả, ngữ pháp truyền thống, ngữ pháp cấu tạo thành tố trực tiếp, ngữ pháp chức năng và ngữ pháp cải biên phái sinh; và những hướng dẫn cơ bản thực hành sử dụng tiếng Anh. Ví dụ, trong phần 5 (các chức năng cú pháp) ta có thể thấy một cách dễ dàng mối quan hệ chặt chẽ giữa câu đơn và các câu phức hợp trong tiếng Anh thông qua việc mở rộng các thành phần của câu đơn. Chẳng hạn như phần chủ ngữ: chủ ngữ trong câu tiếng Anh có thể được diễn đạt bằng: a.Một từ: It always puzzles me. (Điều đó luôn luôn làm em trăn trở) b.Một ngữ đoạn: His coming to see her yesterday evening always puzzles me. (Việc hắn đến thăm cô ấy tối hôm qua luôn luôn làm em trăn trở) c.Một mệnh đề: That he came to see her yesterday evening always puzzles me. (Việc mà hắn đến thăm cô ấy tối hôm qua luôn luôn làm em trăn trở) Whether he came to see her yesterday evening always puzzles me. (Liệu tối hôm qua hắn có đến thăm cô ấy hay không luôn luôn làm em trăn trở) Why he came to see her yesterday evening always puzzles me. (Tại sao tối hôm qua hắn đến thăm cô ấy luôn luôn làm em trăn trở) -2-  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 Chú thích: ‘That clause’ được dùng để diễn đạt những điều đã hiểu, đã được thấy, được biết một cách rõ ràng và cấu trúc này có thể được chuyển dịch sang tiếng Việt là: ‘(cái) việc (mà)…’. Ví dụ: That he took her to Cua Lo last week is nothing to me. (Việc hắn đưa cô ấy đi Cửa Lò tuần trước không là cái gì với em) ‘Whether clause’ được dùng để diễn đạt những điều còn nghi ngờ, không chắc chắn và được chuyển dịch sang tiếng Việt là: ‘Liệu (mà/rằng)…’ Ví dụ: Whether we are in love, or just friend always puzzles me. (Liệu chúng ta yêu nhau hay chỉ là tình bạn luôn luôn làm em trăn trở) ‘Wh- clause’(kể cả mệnh đề bắt đầu bằng ‘how’) dung để diễn đạt những điều, những sự việc có ý nghi vấn. Ví dụ: How much it costs doesn’t matter to me. (Cái đó tốn kém bao nhiêu đi nữa thì cũng không là gì đối với anh) Who is she is nothing to me. (Bà ấy là ai thì cũng không là cái gì đối với em) How many times he comes to see her a week is nothing to me. (Hắn có đến thăm cô ấy một tuần bao nhiêu lần đi nữa thì cũng không là cái gì đối với em) Ngoài ra, cuốn sách cũng cung cấp cho người học các cách nhìn nhận khác nhau về cùng một hiện tượng ngữ pháp trong tiếng Anh. Ví dụ, nếu nhìn nhận đơn vị ngữ đoạn (phrase) từ góc độ chức năng cú pháp thì chúng ta có thể nói rằng cú đoạn là một kết hợp từ không có động từ biến vị và nó có thể làm một chức năng cú pháp nào đó trong câu tiếng Anh. Ví dụ: -3-  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 Living with him is very boring. (chủ ngữ) My puzzle is where to go now. (bổ ngữ) I don’t like his sitting beside her. (tân ngữ) The man coming here yesterday always puzzles me. (định ngữ) Tuy nhiên, nếu chúng ta nhìn nhận ngữ đoạn từ góc độ so sánh sự tương đồng của nó với từ loại thì ta lại có các cú đoạn như cú đoạn danh từ (danh ngữ), cú đoạn tính từ (tính ngữ), cú đoạn trạng từ (trạng ngữ) …. Hy vọng cuốn sách này sẽ có ích với các bạn là người Việt học tiếng Anh. Trong quá trình biên soạn cuốn sách này, mặc dù đã rất cố gắng, nhưng vẫn không tránh khỏi các thiếu sót. Do vậy, chúng tôi xin hoan nghênh mọi ý kiến đóng góp bằng các hình thức khác nhau nhằm làm cho cuốn sách này ngày một hữu ích hơn. Các ý kiến đóng góp xin gửi về địa chỉ: Khoa Tiếng Anh - Đại học Hà nội hoặc Phòng Quản lý Nghiên cứu Khoa học Công nghệ - Đại học Hà nội. Chúng tôi xin chân thành cám ơn. CÁC TÁC GIẢ -4-  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 Preface This grammar book is compiled and designed in such a way that it provides the Vietnamese learners of English with a basic knowledge of different tendencies in the study of grammar, such as: prescriptive grammar, descriptive grammar, traditional grammar, immediate constituent grammar, functional grammar and transformational generative grammar as well as the basic practical guidance of using the English language. For example, in section 5 (syntactic functions) the close relation between the simple sentence and the complex sentence can be clearly seen through the expansion of each part of the simple sentence. Take the subject for example, it can be expressed by: a. a word: It always puzzles me. (Điều đó luôn luôn làm em trăn trở) b. a phrase: His coming to see her yesterday evening always puzzles me. (Việc hắn đến thăm cô ấy tối hôm qua luôn luôn làm em trăn trở) c. a clause: That he came to see her yesterday evening always puzzles me. (Việc(mà) hắn đến thăm cô ấy tối hôm qua luôn luôn làm em trăn trở) Whether he came to see her yesterday evening always puzzles me. ( Liệu tối hôm qua hắn có đến thăm cô ấy hay không luôn luôn làm em trăn trở) Why he came to see her yesterday evening always puzzles me. (Tại sao tối hôm qua hắn đến thăm cô ấy luôn luôn làm em trăn trở) -5-  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 Note: ‘That clause’ is used to express things which are already clearly understood, seen or known, and this pattern can be rendered into Vietnamese as: ‘(cái) việc (mà)…’ E.g.: That he took her to Cua Lo last week is nothing to me. (Việc (mà) hắn đưa cô ấy đi Cửa Lò tuần trước không là cái gì với em) ‘Whether clause’ is used to express things which are in doubt or uncertain and this pattern can be rendered into Vietnamese as: ‘Liệu (mà/rằng) …’ E.g.: Whether we are in love or just friends always puzzles me. (Liệu (rằng) chúng ta yêu nhau hay chỉ là tình bạn luôn luôn làm em trăn trở) ‘Wh- clause’ (including ‘how’) is used to express things or actions of interrogative meaning. E.g.: How much it costs doesn’t matter to me. (Cái đó tốn kém bao nhiêu đi nữathì cũng không là vấn đề gì với anh) Who she is is nothing to me. (Bà ấy là ai thì cũng không là cái gì đối với em) How many times he comes to see her a week is nothing to me. (Hắn có đến thăm cô ấy bao nhiêu lần một tuần đi nữa thì cũng không là cái gì đối với em) This book also provides the learners different ideas of the same grammatical phenomenon in the English language. For example, if we look at the question of phrase from the angle of syntactic function, we can say that the phrase is a word combination without finite verb and it can play some syntactic functions in the English sentence. E.g.: Living with him is very boring. (subject) My puzzle is where to go now. (complement) I don’t like his sitting beside her. (object) The man coming here yesterday always puzzle me. (attribute) However, if we look at ‘phrase’ from the angle of its similarity with the word-class, we have different phrases, such as: noun phrases, adjectival phrases, adverbial phrases, …. -6-  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 We all hope this book will be useful for the Vietnamese learners of English. During the process of compiling and writing this book, despite great efforts, shortcomings are unavoidable. Therefore we welcome all suggestions and contributions in any forming making this book more useful. All suggestions and contributions should be sent to the following addresses: The English Department, Hanoi University; The department of Science and Technology Research Management, Hanoi University. We sincerely thank all. THE AUTHORS -7-  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Our great gratitude goes to Dr. Ta Tien Hung, former Rector of Hanoi University of Foreign Studies, Mr. Le Ngoc Tuong, former Vice Rector of Hanoi University, Dr. Nguyen Dinh Luan, Rector of Hanoi University for their enthusiastic and useful encouragement; the completion of this grammar book cannot come to an end without their encouragement. Our gratitude also goes to Mr. Le Thanh Dzung, former Dean of the English Department, Mr. Bui Van Cat, former Vice Dean of the English Department, Mr. Nguyen Minh Phuc, Dean of the English Department for their active encouragement and support. Our thank also goes to those who have used this book and have offered suggestions, contributions and comments concerning this grammar book. -8-  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 CONTENTS Page 1. A HISTORY OF GRAMMATICAL STUDY 14 2. SOME WAYS OF THINKING ABOUT GRAMMAR 19 2.1 Prescriptive vs. Descriptive Grammar 19 Prescriptive Grammar 19 Descriptive Grammar 20 2.2 Other senses for Grammar 22 A Global sense vs. a narrow sense for Grammar 22 3. GRAMMAR DEVELOPMENT 24 3.1 Traditional Grammar 24 3.2 Immediate constituent (IC) Grammar 27 3.3 Functional Grammar 30 Speech act theory 30 Functional Grammar 32 3.4 Phrase Structures & Transformational Generative Grammar 36 Four ways to determine phrase structures 36 Transformational Generative Grammar 40 4. GRAMMATICAL UNITS 45 4.1 Morphemes and words 45 Free and bound morphemes 46 Roots, stems, bases and affixes 47 ‘Lexical’ and ‘grammatical’ morphemes 49 Inflection and derivation 50 Other ways of forming new words 51 4.2 Phrases 54 4.3 Clauses and sentences 60 5. SYNTACTICAL FUNCTIONS 63 5.1 The subject and predicate 63 5.2 The object 66 5.3 The complement 69 -9-  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 5.4 The attribute 70 5.5 The adverbial/adjunt 71 Adverbial clauses 72 6. THE VERBS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 74 6.1 Definition and categories 74 6.2 Verb forms and Functions 80 Present participles 81 Past participles 84 Gerunds 86 Infinitives 88 6.3 Modal verbs 89 The use of modal auxiliaries 90 Social interaction uses of modals 98 Logical probability uses of modals 99 Other uses of modals 100 6.4 The mood and voice 101 6.4.1 The mood 101 The imperative 102 The subjunctive 105 6.4.2 The voice: Active voice vs. Passive voice 109 Voice 109 A review and an analysis of the passive 109 Semantic and lexical differences 110 Agentless passive 111 Different kinds of passive 111 When to use the passive 112 Stative passive 114 Change of state verbs 114 6.5 The Tenses and Aspects 115 Tenses 115 Aspects 116 Basic primary tenses (+aspects) in English 118 6.6 Direct vs. Indirect Speech 122 Tenses in reported (indirect) speech 124 Reported questions 126 - 10 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 Reported orders requests advices, etc. 127 Reported ‘here and now’ words 127 Other points 127 6.7 Conditional Sentences 129 Tenses in conditional sentences 131 Factual conditional sentences 132 Future (or predictive) conditional sentences 134 Imaginative conditional sentences 135 6.8 Sequences of tenses 136 7. THE NOUNS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 139 7.1 Definition 139 7.2 Classification 140 7.3 Formation 142 7.4 Gender 143 7.5 Number 145 7.6 Case 152 7.7 Noun functions 155 8. THE ADJECTIVE IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 156 8.1 Definition 156 8.2 Classification 157 8.3 Adjective Formation 158 8.4 The comparative Adjective in Sentence Pattern 159 8.5 Adjective Functions 163 8.6 The Order of Adjective in the Sentences 164 9. THE ADVERBS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 166 9.1 Definition 166 9.2 Classification 166 9.3 Adverb Forms and Formation 170 9.4 The comparison of Adverbs 171 9.5 Inversion after the Adverbs 172 10 THE PRONOUNS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 174 10.1 Definition 174 - 11 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 10.2 Classification 175 Demonstrative Pronouns 175 Interrogative Pronouns 176 Relative Pronouns 177 Indefinite Pronouns 178 Personal Pronouns 180 Impersonal Pronouns 181 Possessive Pronouns 181 Reflexive Pronouns 182 Reciprocal Pronouns 184 11. THE ARTICLES IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 185 11.1 Definition 185 11.2 Classification 185 Indefinite Article 186 Definite Article 188 Zero Article 190 Position of Article 192 12. THE NUMERALS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 194 12.1 Definition 194 12.2 Classification 194 Cardinal Numeral 194 Ordinal Numeral 197 13. THE CONJUNCTIONS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 200 13.1 Definition 200 13.2 Classification 200 Coordinating/Coordinative Conjunction 200 Subordinating/Subordinative Conjunction 201 Forms of Conjunction 203 14. THE PREPOSITIONS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 205 14.1 Definition 205 14.2 Classification 207 Types of preposition 207 - 12 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 Preposition of place/position 208 Preposition of time 209 Preposition of direction/movement 209 Preposition of relation 209 15. INTERJECTIONS IN THE ENLISH LANGUAGE 211 16. THE SENTENCES IN THE ENLISH LANGUAGE 213 16.1 Definition 213 16.2 Classification 215 Sentences Classified by meaning 215 Declarative sentences/ Statements 215 Interrogative sentences/Questions 216 Imperative sentences/ Commands, requests, orders, …. 219 Exclamatory sentences/Exclamations 220 Sentences Classified by structure 221 Simple sentences 221 Compound sentences 226 Complex sentences 228 17. CLASSIFICATION OF SUBORDINATE CLAUSES 230 17.1 On the ground of their syntactic function 230 17.2 On the ground of their similarity with word-class 232 The subordinate Noun clause 232 The subordinate Adjective/Attributive clause 233 The subordinate Adverbial clause 236 18. INVERSION and EMPHASIS 240 18.1 The Inversion 240 18.2 The Emphasis 243 19. THE MARKS OF PUNCTUATION 245 19.1 Definition 245 19.2 Classification 245 REFFERENCES 252 - 13 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 1. A HISTORY OF GRAMMATICAL STUDY Grammar is a system of different language forms, the different ways and means of word-building, the morphological inflection of words and the different syntactic structural rules which work as the basis for language communication. Grammar is a systematic analysis of the structures of a language. A contrast is often drawn between a descriptive grammar, which provides a precise account of actual usage, and a prescriptive grammar, which attempts to establish rules for the correct use of language in society. A comprehensive practical description of the structure of a language is a reference grammar. A theoretical grammar goes beyond the study of individual languages, and uses linguistic data as a means of developing insights into the nature of language as such, and into the categories and processes needed for linguistic analysis. A performance grammar analyses the structures found in a corpus of speech or writing; this contrasts with a competence grammar, which is predictive of a speaker’s knowledge. A grammar of the latter kind is usually thought of as a generative grammar, a device which gives a finite specification of the sentences of a language. A grammar which tries to establish the defining (universal) characteristics of human language is a universal grammar. In so far as grammar concentrates on the study of linguistic forms, or analyses language using the formalized techniques of logic or mathematics, it may be referred to as formal grammar; this is often contrasted with notional grammar, which assumes the existence of extra-linguistic categories in order to define grammatical units. Traditional grammar refers to the range of attitudes and methods found in the pre-linguistic era of grammatical study, and especially in the European school grammar of the 18th and 19th centuries. The study of grammar (the word grammar − Greek: grammatike − in fact originally meant 'the art of writing') began with the ancient Greeks, who engaged in philosophical speculation about languages and described language structure. This grammatical tradition was passed on to the Romans, who translated the Greek names for the parts of speech - 14 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 (which is actually a misleading translation of the Greek, meaning 'parts of the language') and grammatical endings into Latin; many of these terms (nominative, accusative, dative) are still found in modern grammars. But the Greeks and Romans were unable to determine how languages are related. This problem spurred the development of comparative grammar, which became the dominant approach to linguistic science in the 19th century. Early grammatical study appears to have gone hand in hand with efforts to understand archaic writings. Thus, grammar was originally tied to societies with long-standing written traditions. The earliest extant grammar is that of the Sanskrit language of India, compiled by the Indian grammarian Panini (flourished about 400 BC). This sophisticated analysis showed how words are formed and what parts of words carry meaning. Ultimately, the grammars of Panini and other Hindu scholars helped in the interpretation of Hindu religious literature written in Sanskrit. The Arabs are believed to have begun the grammatical study of their language before medieval times. In the 10 th century the Jews completed a Hebrew lexicon; they also produced a study of the language of the Old Testament. The Greek grammarian Dionysius Thrax wrote the Art of Grammar, upon which many later Greek, Latin, and other European grammars were based. With the spread of Christianity and the translation of the Scriptures (The Bibles) into the languages of the new Christians, written literatures began to develop among previously non-literate peoples. By the Middle-Ages, European scholars generally knew, in addition to their own languages and Latin, the languages of their nearest neighbors. This access to several languages sets scholars to thinking about how languages might be compared. The revival of classical learning in the Renaissance laid the foundation, however, for a misguided attempt by grammarians to fit all languages into the structure of Greek and Latin. More positively, medieval Christianity and Renaissance learning led to 16th and 17th century surveys of all the then-known languages in an attempt to determine which language might be the oldest. On the basis of the Bible, Hebrew was frequently - 15 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 so designated. Other languages, Dutch, for example, were also chosen because of accidental circumstances rather than linguistic facts. In the 18th century less haphazard comparisons began to be made, culminating in the assumption by the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz that most languages of Europe, Asia, and Egypt came from the same original language, a language referred to as Indo- European. In the 19th century, scholars developed systematic analyses of parts of speech, mostly built on the earlier analyses of Sanskrit. The early Sanskrit grammar of Panini was a valuable guide in the compilation of grammars of the languages of Europe, Egypt, and Asia. This writing of grammars of related languages, using Panini's work as a guide, is known as Indo-European grammar, a method of comparing and relating the forms of speech in numerous languages. The Renaissance approach to grammar, which based the description of all languages on the model of Greek and Latin, died slowly, however. Not until the early 20th century did grammarians begin to describe languages on their own terms. Noteworthy in this regard are the Handbook of American Indian Languages (1911), the work of the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas and his colleagues; and the studies by the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen, A Modern English Grammar (pub. in four parts, 1909-1931), and The Philosophy of Grammar (1924). Boas's work formed the basis of various types of American descriptive grammar study. Jespersen's work was the precursor of such current approaches to linguistic theory as transformational generative grammar. Boas challenged the application of conventional methods of language study to those non-Indo-European languages with no written records, such as the ones spoken by Native North Americans. He saw grammar as a description of how human speech in a language is organized. A descriptive grammar should describe the relationships of speech elements in words and sentences. Given impetus by the fresh perspective of Boas, the approach to grammar known as descriptive - 16 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 linguistics became dominant in the U.S. during the first half of the 20 th century. Jespersen, like Boas, thought grammar should be studied by examining living speech rather than by analyzing written documents, but he wanted to ascertain what principles are common to the grammars of all languages, both at the present time (the so-called synchronic approach) and throughout history (the diachronic approach). Descriptive linguists developed precise and rigorous methods to describe the formal structural units in the spoken aspect of any language. The approach to grammar that developed with this view is known as structural. A structural grammar should describe what the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure referred to by the French word langue, denoting the system underlying a particular language, that is, what members of a speech community speak and hear that will pass as acceptable grammar to other speakers and hearers of that language. Actual speech forms (referred to by the structuralists by the French word parole) represent instances of langue but, in themselves, are not what a grammar should describe. The structuralist approach to grammar conceives of a particular language such as French, Swahili, Chinese, or Arabic as a system of elements at various levels: sound, word, sentence, meaning, that interrelate. A structuralist grammar therefore describes what relationships underlie all instances of speech in a particular language; a descriptive grammar describes the elements of transcribed (recorded, spoken) speech. By the mid-20th century, Chomsky, who had studied structural linguistics, was seeking a way to analyze the syntax of English in a structural grammar. This effort led him to see grammar as a theory of language structure rather than a description of actual sentences. His idea of grammar is that it is a device for producing the structure, not of langue (that is, not of a particular language), but of competence, the ability to produce and understand sentences in any and all languages. His universalist theories are related to the ideas of those 18 th and early 19th century grammarians who urged that grammar be considered a part of logic, the key to analyzing thought. Universal grammarians such as - 17 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 the British philosopher John Stuart Mill, writing as late as 1867, believed rules of grammar to be language forms that correspond to universal thought forms. - 18 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 2. SOME WAYS OF THINKING ABOUT GRAMMAR 2.1. PRESCRIPTIVE versus DESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR 2.1.1. Prescriptive Grammar Most familiarly, ''grammar'' means the rules governing how a language is supposed to be used. In this sense, ''grammar'' is prescriptive. Mostly, prescriptive grammatical rules are phrased as prohibition. Some prohibitions have to do with sentence structure such as: Do not split an infinitive, as in to reluctantly leave. Do not end a sentence with a preposition, as in Who did she go with? Some have to do with uses of particular types of words: Do not use a plural pronoun with a singular antecedent, as in If anyone comes in late they should go quietly to the rear. Do not use double modals, as in I might could help you. Some have to do with how you are supposed to use individual words: Do not use impact as a verb, as in This program is intended to impact the trade imbalance. Do not use hopefully as a sentence adverb, as in Hopefully this book will be fascinating. In prescriptive grammar, authorities of the language - dictionary publishers, editors, critics, writers, and English teachers - lay down the law about how the language is supposed to be used. Prescriptive rules are normative; they aim to regulate people's behavior, much like other normative rules in society, both official and unofficial: the whole vast body of legislated law, unwritten but well-understood rules of etiquette (e.g., send a thank-you note after receiving a gift), customs of dating and courtship (he should ask her out, not vice versa), and so on. There is usually a moral content to normative prescriptions (it is not only illegal, but immoral, most people feel, to rob a bank), and - 19 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 prescriptivists about language are no exception, often taking the position that they are defending virtue, values, and honor against ignorant or lazy corruption. Interestingly, there has long been prescriptive concern about language change, under the assumption that change often means change for the worse. In the late 1700s there were public complaints about the use of existence for life, novel for new, capture for take, and inimical for hostile, and a century later, The Spectator, a British journal of culture, criticized the use of demise for death and phenomenal for extraordinary. In fact, there is no evidence that linguistic change can be identified with linguistic decline. To the contrary, like other systems in a culture (e.g., marriage, law, religion, dress, economy), a language, through being used, adapts to meet the changing needs of its speakers, as well as changing simply to embody style, fashion, and fad. There is no evidence that the English of today is any less logical, any less efficient, any less able to encode thoughts or feelings than the English of 100 or 500 years ago. Moreover, language change has always been with us; consequently it is reasonable to conclude that such change is natural. 2.1.2. Descriptive Grammar In the modern science of linguistics, grammar is 'descriptive' rather than prescriptive. The aim of descriptive grammar is to describe the grammatical system of a language, that is, what speakers of the language unconsciously know, which enables them to speak and understand the language. Descriptive grammar thus embodies constitutive rules, in contrast with the normative rules enshrined in prescriptive prohibitions. Constitutive rules state how some system is structured or defined. For instance, rules of association football or soccer like ''only the goalkeeper is allowed to play with his hands'', ''a goal cannot be scored directly from an indirect free kick'', and ''receiving a forward pass from a teammate without at least two opponents nearer the opponents’ goal line means an offside violation - 20 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 do not regulate how people should behave; rather, they define the game. Similarly, descriptive ''rules'' about a language may be thought of as defining the language. For example, English has a rule 'An article precedes its noun': the book fell, not * book the fell. (An asterisk in this book means that an expression is ungrammatical.) This is not a normative command to English speakers to avoid constructing sentences of the form * book the fell, but a generalization about the structure of English noun phrases, part of a ''definition'' of English just as the football rule ''only the goalkeeper is allowed to play with his hands" is part of the definition of the game of association football. Among the following sentences, it is part of the grammatical knowledge of all speakers of English that while sentences a, b and c are grammatical, d, e and f are not. a. The Celtics are likely to win. b. This is the pen that I had lost. c. America is between the Atlantic and the Pacific. d. * The Celtics are probable to win. e. * This is the pen that I didn't know where I had put. f. * The Atlantic is what America is between the Pacific and. The word sequences of d, e and f are outside what is allowed by the constitutive rules for English. The question for the descriptive linguist is what the content is of the constitutive rules of English which rule in the word sequences of a, b and c while excluding the word sequences of d, e and f. You may wonder why the sequences of d, e and f are of concern at all. In no way do they represent problems in English usage; no speaker of a ''substandard'' dialect uses them; and no foreigner learning English would erroneously produce them. Much more relevant, you might imagine, would be presumably ungrammatical sequences like these: ‘Ann and Sally don't know nothin’. He ain't here. She be here. I go to the movies a lot anymore. - 21 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 However, the first three of these are fully grammatical in certain dialects of English, and the fourth exemplifies a point of grammar that is accepted by many English speakers, even if not by a group identifiable as speaking a dialect. That is why no asterisk precedes them. Sentences d, e and f are important because the ways they are ungrammatical shed light on the rules governing grammaticality, that is, on the constitutive rules defining English sentences. In descriptive grammar, the interest is not in what should be, but in what is: the language that people use all the time, the whole range of different varieties they use in their normal everyday lives, including the varieties they use in their most casual or intimate moments, as well as the varieties they use in their formal, careful speech and writing. In the practice of descriptive grammar no judgment is made about what is right or wrong; speakers of the language are held to be the highest authorities. Literally, ''what they say goes''. ''Correct grammar'', that is, grammaticality, is exemplified in ANY sentences and discourses felt by a native speaker to be the normal way to talk. 2.2. OTHER SENSES FOR "GRAMMAR" Besides the descriptive/prescriptive opposition we have been discussing, there are other meanings for the term ''grammar''. A Global Sense versus a Narrow Sense for ''Grammar'' Within the framework of descriptive grammar, sometimes the term ''grammar'' is used to stand for all the knowledge that a native speaker has about his or her language. Naturally, this includes things concerning different subjects such as morphology, syntax, semantics, phonetics, phonology, discourse analysis, and pragmatics. In other words, ''grammar'' in this wide sense includes everything a native speaker knows about his or her language which enables him or her to speak and understand it. - 22 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 In a narrow sense, the term ''grammar'' is often used to refer to a particular body of information about a language: that having to do only with the structure of words and of sentences. The narrow sense of the term is the more traditional: here, grammar is presented as just one branch of language structure, distinct from phonology and semantics: LANGUAGE phonology semantics grammar phonetics lexicology morphology syntax To sum up, the term ''grammar'' is used in a number of different senses, the grammar of a language may be understood to be a full description of the form and meaning of the sentences of the language or else it may cover only certain, variously delimited, parts of such a description. Here in this book we shall use it basically in one of these narrower senses, embracing morphology and syntax. Morphology is concerned with the forms of words, while syntax is concerned with the way words combine to form sentences. - 23 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 3. GRAMMAR DEVELOPMENT 3.1. TRADITIONAL GRAMMAR By traditional grammar is usually meant the grammars written by classical Greek scholars, the Roman grammars largely derived from the Greek, the speculative work of the medievals, and the prescriptive approach of eighteenth century grammarians. Also, because many grammars used in schools for both native - and foreign-language teaching take their terminology from this tradition, the term also tends to be used to refer to the grammar that people who have been taught grammar at school have learnt. Therefore, one of the possible virtues of traditional grammar is the fact that it is ''the most wide-spread, influential, and best-understood method of discussing Indo-European languages in the Western world'' (Dinneen, 1967). However, many of the terms used in traditional grammar are unintelligible to most people ''though they may have some dim recollection of them from their schooldays'' (Palmer, 1971). Linguists tend to criticize traditional grammar for being based largely on intuitions about grammatical meaning, for being atomistic and not backed by an overall theory or model of grammar, for overemphasizing detail at the expense of attention to larger patterns, and for being internally inconsistent yet prescriptive or normative in nature, ignoring or classing as ungrammatical actual linguistic usage in favour of prescriptive rules derived largely from Latin and Greek and the linguistic categories appropriate to these rules and categories which may not be suitable to even all Indo-European languages, and certainly not to most non-Indo-European Languages (Dinneen, 1967; Allen & Widdowson, 1975). However, while much of this criticism is well founded, it should not be forgotten that a great deal of the grammatical terminology and many of the concepts used in linguistic theory derive from traditional grammar, - 24 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 and that, ultimately, western linguistics derives from the Greek preoccupation with language, although traditional school grammar derives most directly from the adaptation of Greek grammar to Latin by Priscian (6th century). Priscian's work is divided into eighteen books. The first sixteen, which the medievals called Priscianus major, deal with morphology, and the last two, Priscianus minor, deal with syntax. Here, Priscian defined eight parts of speech: 1. The noun is a part of speech that assigns to each of its subjects, bodies, or things a common or proper quality. 2. The verb is a part of speech with tenses and moods, but without case [the noun is inflected for case], that signifies acting or being acted upon. 3. The participles are not explicitly defined, but it is stated that they should come in third place rightfully, since they share case with the noun and voice and tense with the verbs. 4. The pronoun is a part of speech that can substitute for the proper name of anyone and that indicates a definite person... 5. A preposition is an indeclinable part of speech that is put before others, either next to them or forming a composite with them. 6. The adverb is an indeclinable part of speech whose meaning is added to the verb. 7. The interjection is not explicitly defined, but is distinguished from an adverb, with which the Greeks identified it, by reason of the syntactic independence it shows and because of its emotive meaning. 8. The conjunction is an indeclinable part of speech that links other parts of speech, in company with which it has significance, by clarifying their meaning or relations. Priscian's grammar was ''the most respected grammar of the medieval period''. It was adjusted in the twelfth century by Peter Helias, a teacher at the University of Paris, to take account of changes which the Latin language had undergone since Priscian's time, and also to take account of the new interest in Aristotelean logic of the period. The only formal - 25 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 advance made by Helias' commentary was a development of Priscian's original distinction between substantival nouns and adjectival nouns, which became the now familiar distinction between nouns and adjectives. In addition to the notion of parts of speech, according to most traditional grammars, there are eight parts of speech, namely noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, preposition, conjunction, adverb, and interjection, the Greeks developed most of the grammatical concepts we are familiar with today, such as gender, inflection, voice, case, number, tense, and mood. Grammars of English became common in the eighteenth century. These early English grammars were written by scholars steeped in the Latin tradition, who felt that a grammar should provide a set of rules for correct language use (see also ‘prescriptive versus descriptive grammar’ above). As mentioned earlier, it should not be forgotten that a great deal of the grammatical terminology in linguistic theory derive from traditional grammar, including the terminology that refers to grammatical units, such as words, phrases, clauses, and sentences, on the one hand, and to categories, such as gender, number, person, tense, mood, voice, and case on the other hand. The traditional categories and their definitions are: GENDER (masculine, feminine, and neuter) a feature of nouns, associated with male, female, and sexless things. NUMBER (singular and plural) a feature of nouns and verbs, associated with one thing and more than one thing respectively. PERSON (first, second, and third) classifies the pronouns and is a feature of verbs. TENSE (present, past, and future) a feature of verbs, giving them a time reference. MOOD (indicative and subjunctive) a feature of the verb associated with statements of fact versus possibility, supposition, etc. VOICE (active and passive) a feature of the verb, indicating whether the subject is the doer of the action of the recipient of it. - 26 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 CASE ( nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative and ablative) a feature of the noun, largely functionally definable (nominative for mentioning the subject, vocative for exclaiming or calling, accusative for mentioning the object, genitive for indicating ownership, dative for indicating benefit, ablative for indicating direction or agent-hood; these definitions are not watertight and there are variations within languages). In summary, traditional grammar is a term often used to summarize the range of attitudes and methods found in the period of grammatical study before the advent of linguistic science. The ''tradition'' in question is over 2,000 years old and includes the work of classical Greek and Roman grammarians, Renaissance writers, and 18th-century prescriptive grammarians. Traditional grammar characteristically studies different language elements or parts of speech (which are different groups of words or word classes in English) separately. It is difficult to generalize about such a wide variety of approaches, but linguists generally use the term pejoratively, identifying an unscientific approach to grammatical study, in which languages were analyzed in terms of Latin, with scant regard for empirical facts. However, many basic notions used by modern approaches can be found in these earlier writings, and there is now fresh interest in the study of traditional grammar, as part of the history of linguistic ideas. 3.2. IMMEDIATE CONSTITUENT GRAMMAR In describing the structure of sentences, words are not the only units that we need. Although we can break a sentence down into a sequence of words, we will not go from sentence to word in a single step but will recognize units intermediate in size between sentence and word. One of the most widely used techniques for displaying sentence structure in this direction is the use of immediate constituent (IC) analysis. This approach works through the different levels of structure within a sentence in a series of steps. At each level, a construction is divided into its major constituents, and the process continues until no further - 27 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 divisions can be made. For example, to make an IC analysis of the sentence ‘The girl chased the dog’ we carry out the following steps: 1. Identify the two major constituents, the girl and chased the dog. 2. Divide the next-biggest constituent into two, viz. chased the dog into chased and the dog. 3. Continue dividing constituents into two until we can go no further, viz. the girl and the dog into the + girl, the + dog, and chased into chase + -ed ending. The order of segmentation can be summarized using lines or brackets. If the first cut is symbolized by a single vertical line, the second cut by two lines, and so on, the sentence would look like this: the /// girl / chase /// -ed // the /// dog However, a much clearer way of representing a constituent structure is through the use of 'tree diagrams': The girl chased the dog The girl chased the dog IC grammar is based on the argument that different elements of language do not belong to the same layer; they belong to different layers and create different meanings. You can see this more clearly in the following analyses of the two sentences ‘He likes pleasing women’ - 28 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 and ‘More beautiful girls are coming’. The sentences can be analyzed in two different ways and consequently have different meanings: (A) (B) He likes pleasing women He likes pleasing women Analysis (A) results in that the sentence means that ''he'' likes women who know how to please other people (and him), whereas analysis (B) gives the sentence a different meaning: what 'he' likes is to please women. In the same way, ‘More beautiful girls are coming’ can either mean the girls who are coming are more beautiful than the girls present, or the girls present are beautiful and the girls who are coming are also beautiful without a comparison. Representations of structure like these are very helpful, as far as they go. But not all sentences are as easy to analyze in IC terms as these ones. It is sometimes not clear where the cuts should be made (e.g., whether to divide the three old men into the + three old men or the three old + men, or the three + old men). More important, the process of segmenting individual sentences does not take us very far in understanding the grammar of a language. IC analyses do not inform us about the identity of the sentence elements they disclose, nor do they provide a means of showing how sentences relate to each other grammatically (as with statements and questions, actives and passives). To develop a deeper understanding of grammatical structure, alternative approaches must be used. - 29 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 3.3. FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR 3.3.1. Speech-act theory The Oxford philosopher J.L. Austin (1911−1960) was the first to draw attention to the many functions performed by utterances as part of interpersonal communication. Austin points out that there are many declarative sentences which do not describe, report, or state anything, and of which it makes no sense to ask whether they are true or false. The utterance of such sentences is, or is part of, the doing of some action - an action which would not normally be described as simply saying something. Austin gives a number of examples: I do, as uttered as part of a marriage ceremony; I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth, as uttered by the appropriate person while smashing a bottle against the stem of the ship in question; I give and bequeath my watch to my brother, as written in a will; I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow. To utter such sentences in the appropriate circumstances is not to describe what you are doing: it is doing it, or part of doing it, and Austin calls such utterances performatives or performative utterances, distinguishing them from constatives or constative utterances which are used to state a fact or describe a state of affairs. Only constatives can be true or false; performatives are happy or unhappy. In speech act analysis, we study the effect of utterances on the behavior of speaker and hearer, using a threefold distinction. First, we recognize the bare fact that a communicative act takes place: the locutionary act. Secondly, we look at the act that is performed as a result of the speaker making an utterance - the cases where ''saying = doing'', such as betting, promising, welcoming, and warning: these, known as illocutionary acts, are the core of any theory of speech acts. Thirdly, we look at the particular effect the speaker's utterance has on the listener, who may feel amused, persuaded, warned, etc., as a - 30 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 consequence: the bringing about of such effects is known as a perlocutionary act. It is important to appreciate that the illocutionary force of an utterance and its perlocutionary effect may not coincide. If we warn you against a particular course of action, you may or may not heed our warning. Some speech acts directly address a listener, but the majority of acts in everyday conversation are indirect. For example, there are a very large number of ways of asking someone to perform an action. The most direct way is to use the imperative construction (Shut the door), but it is easy to sense that this would be inappropriate in many everyday situations. Alternatives stress such factors as the hearer's ability or desire to perform the action, or the speaker's reasons for having the action done. These include the following: I'd be grateful if you'd shut the door. Could you shut the door? Would you mind shutting the door? It'd help to have the door shut. It's getting cold in here. Shall we keep out the draught? Now, Jane, what have you forgotten to do? Brrr! Any of these could, in the right situation, function as a request for action, despite the fact that none has the clear form of an imperative. But of course, it is always open to the hearer to misunderstand an indirect request - either accidentally or deliberately. For instance, Teacher: Johnny, there's some chalk on the floor. Johnny: Yes, there is, sir. Teacher: Well, pick it up, then! - 31 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 3.3.2. Functional Grammar Several approaches look for alternatives to an abstract, formal approach to grammar. This particular theory adopts a pragmatic view of language as social interaction, and sets up 'functional' units of a pragmatic and syntactic kind within sentence structure. The notion of function here is treated as central, especially to show grammar communicating meaning in social interaction. The following brief discussion will concentrate on functional grammar as developed by M.A.K. Halliday. Halliday defines a functional grammar as ‘essentially a “natural” grammar, in the sense that everything in it can be explained, ultimately, by reference to how language is used’ - the focus here is on language use. Halliday's functional grammar is not a formal grammar; indeed, he opposes the term ''functional'' to the term ''formal''. This grammar begins from the premise that language has certain functions for its users as a social group, of which the two major functions or meta-functions are the ideational "content" function and the interpersonal function; language is a means of reflecting on things, and a means of acting on things - though the only things it is possible to act on by means of a symbolic system such as language are humans (and some animals). Both meta-functions rely on a third, the textual function (by text, Halliday means ''everything that is said or written''), which enables the other two to be realized, and which ensures that the language used is relevant. The textual function represents the language user’s text forming potential. Halliday's systemic theory, which underlies his functional grammar, ''is a theory of meaning as choice'', and for Halliday, grammar is always seen as meaningful: ‘A language...... is a system for making meanings: a semantic system, with other systems for encoding the meanings it produces. The term ''semantics'' does not simply refer to the meanings of words; it is the entire system of meanings of a - 32 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 language, expressed by grammar as well as by vocabulary. In fact the meanings are encoded in ''wordings'': grammatical sequences, or ''syntagms'', consisting of items of both kinds - lexical items such as most verbs and nouns, grammatical items like the and of and if, as well as those of an in-between type such as prepositions.’ Halliday, M.A.K. (1985), An introduction to Functional Grammar, London, Edward Arnold, p.17. The ideational, interpersonal, and textual functions are therefore functional components of the semantic system that is language. The grammar enables all three of them to come into play at every point of every text: it receives meanings from each component and splices them together in the wordings, as Halliday shows through his analysis of the clause in English. The clause is chosen because it is the grammatical unit in which 'three distinct structures, each expressing one kind of semantic organization, are mapped onto one another to produce a single wording' (1985, p. 38; and p. 53): Ideational meaning is the representation of experience: our experience of the world that lies about us, and also inside us, the world of our imagination. It is meaning in the sense of 'content'. The ideational function of the clause is that of representing what in the broadest sense we can call 'processes': actions, events, processes of consciousness, and relations.... Interpersonal meaning is meaning as a form of action: the speaker or writer doing something to the listener or reader by means of language. The interpersonal function of the clause is that of exchanging roles in rhetorical interaction: statements, questions, offers and commands, together with accompanying modalities.... Textual meaning is relevance to the context: both the preceding (and following) text, and the context of situation. The textual function of the clause is that of constructing a message. - 33 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 The message is constructed in the English clause in terms of theme and rheme. One element of the clause is given the special status of theme by being put first, and it then combines with the rest of the clause to constitute the message. The theme is defined as ''the element which serves as the point of departure of the message; it is that with which the clause is concerned'', and the rest of the message is referred to as the rheme; the theme is normally realized by nominal groups, or prepositional phrases: (a) Tomas gave Sophie that Easter egg (b) That Easter egg was given to Sophie by Tomas (c) Sophie was given that Easter egg by Tomas (d) At Easter Tomas went to see Sophie and Katie (e) Very soon they were eating Easter eggs (The underlined is the theme; the rest is the rheme.) Themes may also be realized by clauses, as in the case of: What Tomas gave to Sophie was an Easter egg. However, in this case the clause what Tomas gave to Sophie functions as a nominal group in the whole clause; this phenomenon is referred to as nominalization. It is also possible to have cases of predicated theme having the form it + be, as in: It was an Easter egg that Tomas gave to Sophie. The most usual themes in English are those realized by the grammatical subject of the clause, and these are called unmarked themes; when the theme is something other than the subject, it is called marked theme, as in (d) and (e) above. In its interpersonal function, as an interactive event, an exchange between speakers, the clause in English is organized in terms of mood. Mood is the relationship between the grammatical subject of the clause and the finite element of the verbal group, with the remainder of the - 34 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 clause called the residue. So nay indicative clause - a clause which has a subject and a finite element will have a mood structure. Subject and finite together make up the proposition of the clause, the part that can be affirmed, denied, questioned, and negotiated by speakers in other ways (wished about, hoped for, demanded, etc.). The grammatical subject of a declarative clause is recognizable as that element which is picked up in the pronoun of a tag (1985, p. 73): So in order to locate the Subject, add a tag (if one is not already present) and see which element is taken up. For example, that teapot was given to your aunt: here the tag would be wasn't it?, we cannot add wasn't she?. On the other hand with that teapot your aunt got from the duke the tag would be didn't she?, we cannot say didn't he? or wasn't it? It is that by reference to which the proposition is affirmed, denied, etc. The finite element further enhances the proposition as something to negotiate by (1) giving it a primary tense (past, present, future) and (2) a modality, an indication of the speaker's attitude in terms of certainty and obligation to what she or he is saying. The clause residue consists of three kinds of functional element: one (and only one) predicator, one or two complements and up to about seven adjuncts. The predicator is what there is of the verbal group in addition to the finite - if there is one; some clauses, known as non- finite clauses, have only a predicator. The complement is anything that could have functioned as the subject in the clause, but which does not, including, thus, nominal groups realizing what other grammarians tend to refer to as direct and indirect objects, and also what Halliday refers to as attributive complement: for instance, a famous politician in Dick Whittington became a famous politician. The adjunct(s) include those elements which do not have the potential of being used as subjects. Halliday (1985) further explores grammatical functions above, below, and beyond the clause. Halliday relates both his grammatical theory - 35 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 and his theory of first-language acquisition to an account of how language relates to the world in which it is used, thus producing one of the most comprehensive theories of language as a social phenomenon. 3.4. PHRASE STRUCTURES and TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR A good way of putting more information into an analysis would be to name, or label, the constituents that emerge each time a sentence is segmented; each label abbreviates a formal category. The approach that is most widely practiced has developed its own abbreviations such as NP for Noun Phrase, VP for Verb Phrase, S for Sentence, AP for Adjective Phrase, PP for Preposition Phrase, and so on. Phrase structure is the division of a sentence into parts, or constituents, and the division of those constituents into subparts. For instance, the sentence ‘The bear went over the mountain’ is made up of two main constituents, ‘The bear and went over the mountain’. The second constituent is, in turn divided into two parts, went and over the mountain, which is divided even further, into over and the mountain. All sentences have such hierarchical structure, even a very simple two- word sentence like ‘Carol giggled’. 3.4.1. There are four ways to determine phrase structure: One approach to determining phrase structure is a substitution test: whatever you can substitute a single word for, preserving grammaticality, is a constituent or phrase, that is, a ''chunk''; and whatever cannot be substituted for is not. In The bear went over the mountain, we can easily find one-word substitutions for the bear. As a result, we can have new sentences like ‘Max went over the mountain’, ‘He went over the mountain’, ‘Tigers went over the mountain’. The substitution need not preserve meaning, just grammaticality. The new sentence created by the substitution can mean anything at all, but it must be a grammatical sentence. The new sentences created by the substitutions for The bear meet this test, so we can conclude that in the original sentence The bear is a constituent. - 36 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 Now let's look at some other word sequences in ‘The bear went over the mountain’. How about bear went? There don't seem to be any single-word substitutions for it. The results of substitutions such as smoke, green, it for bear went aren't grammatical sentences; and since no substitution seems possible for bear went, we can conclude that it isn't a constituent in ‘The bear went over the mountain’. Constituents can be longer than two words. For went over the mountain in ‘The bear went over the mountain’ we can substitute any single intransitive verb or any transitive verb whose direct object can be optionally omitted: ‘The bear slept’, ‘The bear awoke’, ‘The bear ate’. A second criterion for finding constituents is the ability of constituents to ‘move’: For ‘The bear went over the mountain’ we can ''move'' over the mountain to the front position in the sentence: ‘Over the mountain the bear went’. We can ''move'' a word sequence in a sentence when we can find a paraphrase of the sentence which has the word sequence in a different place. Note that the movement criterion, since it relies on paraphrase, requires keeping the meaning the same, unlike the substitution criterion. A third test for 'constituency' is whether the word sequence in the sentence can be conjoined with a similar sequence. In The bear went over the mountain, all constituents can be: a. The bear and the moose went over the mountain. b. The bear went over the mountain and came back again. c. The bear went over the mountain and across the lake. d. The bear went over the mountain and the pass. A final criterion for constituency is whether the sequence in question can be the antecedent for a pro-word (i.e., a pronoun or a word with a similar function). It seems to be generally true that pro-forms can only use constituents for their antecedents, never non-constituents. The technical term for the relation between a pro-word (or, more generally, pro-expression) and its antecedent is anaphora. All the constituents in - 37 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 The bear went over the mountain can be justified under the anaphora test: a. The bear went over the mountain. He was hungry. b. The bear went over the mountain. He did so in order to see what was on the other side. c. The bear went over the mountain. He went there because he had a strong drive to conquer new challenges. d. The bear went over the mountain. In fact, he went back and forth over it several times before he got tired of the scenery. Phrasal categories are named according to the most important word of the phrase. Noun Phrases (NPs) are so labeled because they typically contain nouns - the exception: a Noun Phrase can be made up of just a pronoun. Verb Phrases (VPs) always contain verbs. Adjective Phrases (APs) are so-called because an adjective is the only required word; intensifiers are optional. Prepositional phrases (PP) contain a preposition and an NP. With these labels, ‘The girl chased the dog’ and ‘The bear went over the mountain’ can be displayed as tree diagrams: S S NP VP NP VP DET N V PP NP P NP DET N V DET N DET N The girl chased the dog The bear went over the mountain However, grammarians are concerned to move beyond analyses of single sentences to see whether their analyses work for other sentences in the language. In Avram Noam Chomsky's approach, first outlined in Syntactic Structures (1957), the jump from single-sentence analysis is made by devising a set of rules that would ''generate'' tree structures - 38 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 such as the above. The procedure can be illustrated using the following rules: The girl chased the dog. The bear went over the mountain. S => NP + VP S => NP + VP VP => V + NP VP => V + PP NP => DET + N PP => P + NP V => chased NP => DET + N DET => the V => went N => girl, dog P => over DET => the N => bear, mountain Grammars that generate phrase structures in this way have come to be called ''phrase structure grammars'' or PSGs. If we follow these rules through, it can be seen that there is already a significant increase in the ''power'' of this grammar over the single-sentence analysis used previously. If we choose the girl for the first NP, and the dog for the second, we generate the girl chased the dog; but if the choices are made the other way round, we generate the sentence the dog chased the girl. By the simple device of adding a few more words to the rules, suddenly a vast number of sentences can be generated: V => chased, saw, hit... V => went, ran DET => the, a P => over, down N => girl, man, bear N => bear, tiger; mountain, hill The girl chased the man The bear went over the hill The man saw the bear The tiger ran over the hill The bear hit the girl etc. The tiger ran down the hill etc. - 39 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 3.4.2. Transformational Grammar In the mid-1960s work on the developing theory of transformational grammar (or Transformational-Generative - TG) was perhaps coherent enough for one to be able to talk of a school of transformational linguistics. This is not possible today. Many who grew up within the model have gone on to develop theories of their own, often in reaction to the current work of Chomsky, and even among those who would describe themselves as transformational linguists there is considerable divergence. That having been said, many linguists adhere to some version of a grammar they would describe as transformational and that owes its intellectual genesis to one or other of the continually developing models offered by Chomsky. As for Chomsky himself, his ideas continue to develop and in this part we will concentrate discussion round one of Chomsky's most influential books: Syntactic Structures (1957). In 1957, Avram Noam Chomsky, Professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1928-..), published Syntactic Structures, which proved to be a turning point in 20 th century linguistics. The first chapter of the book declared that grammar was an autonomous system, independent of semantics (i.e., the meanings associated with the forms of the language) and of the study of the use of language in situations, and furthermore that it should be formalized as a system of rules which generate an infinite set of sentences. This approach contrasted sharply with the then fashionable orthodoxy that believed that the application of appropriate procedures to a corpus (plural: corpora - a body or collection of linguistic data for use in scholarship and research, e.g.: samples in the forms of a collection of tape recordings) of data would yield a grammatical description. Chomsky (1957) rejected the use of a corpus, arguing that such corpora were inadequate because they could provide only a tiny fraction of the sentences it is possible to say in a language; they also contained many non-fluencies, changes of plan, and other errors of performance (i.e., the actual use of a language in real situations.) Speakers use their - 40 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 competence (i.e., a person's knowledge of the rules of a language) to go far beyond the limitations of any corpus, by being able to create and recognize novel sentences, and to identify performance errors. The description of the rules governing the structure of this competence was thus the more important goal. It was mentioned above that Chomsky (1957) proposed that grammar should be considered as an autonomous system, independent of semantic or phonological systems, though, of course, bearing a relation to them. Furthermore, he proposed that the syntax itself should consist of a number of distinct but related levels, each of which is characterized by distinct rule types and each of which bears a particular part of the descriptive burden. The two most important are: the phrase- structure (see above) and transformational components. The phrase-structure component consists of a set of phrase-structure (PS) rules which formalize some of the traditional insights of constituent-structure analysis. Consider the following set of rules: entence => NP + VP NP => DET + N + (Number) Number => {sing, pl} VP => Verb + NP Verb => Aux + V Aux => Tense Tense => {pres, past} DET => the N => man, ball, etc. V => hit, took, etc. (items in brackets {} are alternatives, i.e., Number is either sing(ular) or p(lura)l, Tense is either pre(sent) or past.) - 41 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 Sentence NP VP DET N Number Verb NP Sing. Aux. V DET N Number Tense Sing Past the man hit the ball Each rule is an instruction to rewrite the symbol on the left of the arrow as the symbol or symbols on the right: informally, it can be construed as ''the category on the left of the arrow has the constituent(s) specified on the right of the arrow''. A derivation from this grammar can then be represented by the tree shown above. Structures generated by the PS rules are referred to as underlying structures. One small reason should be immediately apparent: the postulated underlying structure shown above is characterized by a degree of abstraction. The NPs are analyzed as containing a marker of number, and the analysis of the verb form hit as a past-tense form is shown by postulating an element, ''Tense'', preceding the verb itself. None of these items has an overt realization in the actually occurring form of the sentence. The reason: - 42 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 PS rules of this kind can be elaborated to capture certain basic facts about the grammar of English: facts about constituency, that strings like the man are and those like man hit are not proper constituents of the sentence (see above); facts about the sub-categorization of lexical items, e.g., a transitive verb like hit requires to be followed by an NP; facts about functional relations like subject, object, and main verb. The transformational component consists of rules which perform a variety of functions. Some of them are rules which relate particular sentence types to each other, as active sentences to their passive counterparts; rules that account for morphological operations of various kinds, like number agreement between subject and verb; rules that are responsible for generating complex sentences. A transformational rule is a rule which maps one syntactic-analysis tree into another. If PS rules can be informally thought of as instructions to build up structures like those above (the man hit the ball), then a transformational rule can be informally thought of as an instruction to change one structure into another. Thus, transformational rules enable the grammar to show the relationship between sentences that have the same meaning but are of different grammatical form. The link between active and passive sentences, for example, can be shown - such as ‘the man hit the ball’ (active) and ‘the ball was hit by the man’ (passive). The kind of formulation needed to show this is: NP1 + V + NP2 => NP2 + Aux + V-en + by + NP1 which is an economical way of summarizing all the changes you would have to introduce, in order to turn the first sentence into the second. If this formula were to be translated into English, four separate operations would be recognized: (i) The first noun phrase in the active sentence (NP1) is placed at the end of the passive sentence. (ii) The second noun phrase in the active sentence (NP2) is placed at the beginning of the passive sentence. - 43 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 (iii) The verb (V) is changed from past tense to past participle (V-en), and an auxiliary verb (Aux) is inserted before it. (iv) A particle by is inserted between the verb and the final noun phrase. (This rule will generate all regular active-passive sentences.) As mentioned above, in subsequent development of generative grammar, many kinds of transformational rules came to be used, and the status of such rules in a grammar has proved to be controversial. Recent generative grammars look very different from the model proposed in Syntactic Structures. But the fundamental conception of sentence organization as a single process of syntactic derivation remains influential, and it distinguishes this approach from those accounts of syntax that represent grammatical relations using a hierarchy of a separate ranks. - 44 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 4. GRAMMATICAL UNITS The first step usually taken in the study of grammar is to identify units in the stream of speech (or writing, or signing) - The following five- rank hierarchy is a widely used model in the study of grammar: SENTENCES SENTENCES are analyzed into are used to build CLAUSES CLAUSES are analyzed into are used to build PHRASES PHRASES are analyzed into are used to build WORDS WORDS are analyzed into are used to build MORPHEMES MORPHEMES Morphemes are the ''lower'' limit of grammatical enquiry, for they have no grammatical structure. Similarly, sentences form the ''upper'' limit of grammatical study, because they do not usually form a part of any larger grammatical unit. Part IV will deal with the definitions of these five grammatical units and discussion round them. 4.1. MORPHEMES AND WORDS In traditional grammar, words are the basic units of analysis. Grammarians classify words according to their parts of speech and identify and list the forms that words can show up in. As you can easily see, many words in the English language have no internal grammatical structure. These words (e.g., yes, boat, car, head, etc.) can be analyzed into constituent sounds or syllables but none of these has a meaning in isolation. - 45 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 By contrast, many words can be divided into parts, each of which has some kind of independent meaning. The smallest meaningful elements/units into which words can be analyzed are known as morphemes; and the way morphemes operate in language provides the subject matter of morphology. Although speakers of English probably know more about words than any other parts of their language, words are extremely difficult entities to define in either universal or language-specific terms. Like most linguistic entities, they are Janus-like. They look in two directions - upward toward phrases and sentences and downward toward their constituent morphemes. Therefore, a better way to understand words is to study how they are divided into smaller elements, or, in other words, how they are formed. Word-building (or word-formation) will be discussed later in this section. Free and bound morphemes As mentioned above, words can be analyzed into morphemes, the smallest grammatical meaningful units. You may observe that some morphemes can stand alone as independent words since they carry full semantic weight. These are called free morphemes: E.g., care in careful, happy in unhappiness, order in disorder, etc. However, many morphemes cannot stand alone in the language. They are bound morphemes which only add the meaning or grammatical function of a free morpheme, and cannot stand alone; e.g.,-ful in careful, un- & -ness in unhappiness, dis- in disorder, etc. Allomorphs: Any of two or more alternative forms of a unit of meaning (eg. The morpheme –es in benches and the –s in hats) that vary with its environment. Morphemic variants are allomorphs. They are the same morpheme but they vary in pronunciation and/or spelling, such as the /t/ in the word worked, the /d/ in the word listened and the /id/ in the word added and the variants in the following words: reader/visitor/liar. - 46 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 Roots, Stems, Bases and Affixes Besides being free or bound, morphemes can also be classified as root, stem, or affix. A root morpheme (or root) is the basic form to which other morphemes can be attached. In English most roots are free morphemes, but not all. For instance, the words chronology, chronic, and chronograph all contain the root chron- (meaning, basically, ''time''), which is not free, but bound, because it never occurs alone as a word. Similarly renovate and novice contain a bound root nov- (meaning, basically, ''new''). Stems are also forms to which other morphemes can be attached. Stems differ from roots in that they may be made up of more than one morpheme. All roots are stems, but many stems are not roots (but contain them). Stems are sometimes created by the juxtaposition of two roots in a compound. Both baby and sit are roots (and stems), but baby- sit is a stem (but not a root) because -er can be attached to it. Stems can also be formed by adding meaningless elements to certain roots. The - n- in binary and trinity is one such stem-forming element, attached to the roots bi- ("two") and tri- ("three"). Another is the -o- in chronograph and chronology. These stem-forming element are not morphemes because by ‘morphemes we mean ''smallest unit with a meaning''. Stem-formers have no meaning or grammatical function. They are present only for phonological reasons. Base or base form: (1) The basic or uninflected form of a verb. This is also called ‘base form’. Go, like, sing, eat are all bases or base forms, in contrast to: went, likes, sung, ate which are not. This is applied to verbs only. The base form of a verb functions: a/ non-finitely, as the infinitive (eg.: You must go/ She can speak/ We should do it carefully) b/ finitely: + as the imperative (eg.: Listen! / Be quiet. / Have a biscuit. / Come on. / Hurry up.) - 47 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 + as the present indicative tense for all persons other than the third – 3rd person singular (eg.: I always listen as opposed to He always listens / I teach English as opposed to She teaches English, (the verb be is an exception to this). + as the so-called present subjunctive (eg.: They insisted that he listen. / The boss demanded that nobody be absent from the company’s meeting.). (2) The base or base form is used as an element in word formation a/ The terminology of word formation is confused. Many words consist of an irreducible ‘core’ word (a free morpheme) to which one or more affixes (bound morphemes) are attached, eg.: sing + s = sings, great + er = greater, great + ly = greatly, infect + ious = infectious, in + discrete = indiscrete. Such basic core words as elements in larger words may be called base morphemes, but are more often called roots (or stems). b/ Another type of word when stripped of an affix is no longer a complete word, but a ‘bound morpheme’. Eg.: Gratuitous apparently has the suffix –ous (compare: pompous, montrous, outrageous, famous, dangerous, ……), just as gratuity has a noun suffix –y but there is no word *gratuit. Such a form may be termed a base (or a base morpheme) in some systems. (But the term stem and root are also used.) c/ A different problem arises with a word such as unanswerable. It clearly consists of the prefix un-, the word answer, and the suffix – able. But we do not have the word: *unanswer; we can only attach un- to answerable. Some linguists therefore specifically reverse the term base for a word such as answerable in the context of unanswerable. In this usage, a base is not as basic as the ‘core’ element (here: answer). But other linguists use stem as the label here, possibly also including forms such as: gratuit- Affix is a general term for prefix and suffix, which are both bound morphemes. Prefixes are morphemes added before a word to form a - 48 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 new word. Suffixes are morphemes added after a word in the formation of a new word. One complication in morphological structure is the existence of infixes. An infix is a bound morpheme occurring right inside another morpheme, unlike the other affix types, prefixes and suffixes. In English, there are no infixes, but they are not uncommon in the languages of the world. English has some morphological phenomena which at first glance look like infixation, but are better described otherwise. Plurals like "geese" for "goose" and "feet" for "foot" do not contain infix morphemes, despite appearances, because [gs] and [ft] are not morphemes. Rather, what English has in words like these is the result of a replacement process, a kind of morphological irregularity (cases like speedometer, spokeswoman, fisherman, or abso-blooming- lutely in abso-blooming-lutely awful, etc., are advised to be seen in the same direction.) ''Lexical'' and ''grammatical'' morphemes Lexical morphemes express meanings that can be relatively easily specified by using dictionary terms or by pointing out examples of things, events, or properties which the morphemes can be used to refer to: tree, burp, above, red, pseudo-, anti, -ism, honest. Grammatical morphemes have one (or both) of two characteristics. First, they express very common meanings, meanings which speakers of the language unconsciously consider important enough to be expressed very often. Verb tense morphemes are an example. In Max played and Max loves donuts, -ed and -s are grammatical morphemes. Another example is morphemes expressing noun number (singular vs. plural). The other characteristic that grammatical morphemes may exhibit is the expression of relations within a sentence (instead of denoting things, properties, or events in the world). The verb suffix -s for third person singular present tense, for example, besides indicating tense, marks 'agreement' between subject and verb. - 49 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 The definition of ''grammatical morpheme'' is disjunctive: any morpheme is ''grammatical'' if it fits either (or both) of the two characteristics: (1) It expresses a very common meaning or is specifically required in some context; or (2) it expresses a relation within a sentence rather than denoting things, activities, etc., in the world. Some of the most commonly used grammatical morphemes in English are bound: for example, -s, -ed, -ing, -er, -est. Others are free, that is, independent words. A few examples of free grammatical morphemes are the, passive by, as in...as...as..., to before infinitive verbs. Free grammatical morphemes are also called function words. Inflection and derivation Another useful morphological distinction is between two kinds of bound morphemes: inflectional and derivational. Roughly speaking, a derivational morpheme creates - ''derives'' - a new word when attached, while an inflectional morpheme creates a new form of the old word. Inflectional morphology and derivational morphology are two main fields traditionally recognized within morphology. Inflectional morphology studies the way in which words vary (or inflect) in order to express grammatical contrasts in sentences, such as singular/plural or past/present tense. Thus, morphemes like -s in boys, -es in potatoes, - ies in lorries or -es in 'He goes to school every day’, went from go are called inflectional morphemes. Altogether, there are only eight inflectional affixes (all suffixes) in English: plural (-s and its irregular variants, e.g., as in men); -'s (possessive); -s (verb suffix for third person singular present tense); - ing (verb suffix meaning ‘in progress’); -er (comparative); -est (superlative suffix); 'perfect' suffix on verbs (-en, and variants, e.g., as in put and gone); and past tense (-ed and irregular variants, e.g., as in bought and ate). - 50 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 Derivational morphology, however, studies the principles governing the construction of new words, without reference to the specific grammatical role a word might play in a sentence. In the formation of drinkable from drink, or taxation from tax, for example, we see the formation of different words, with their own grammatical properties. Elements that are added to a word to form new word(s) are called derivational morphemes. A more traditional term for derivational morphemes is affixes (prefixes and suffixes). Actually, affixation (or derivation) including prefixation and suffixation is a productive way to form new words in English. Other ways of forming new words Like all other languages in the world, English changes, new words are created through a variety of creative mechanisms. Besides derivation, important processes include compounding, conversion or ''zero- derivation'' (eg.: hand(n) – to hand(v)/ water(n) – to water(v)/ dog(n) – to dog(v)/ empty(adj) – to empty(v)……….), the use of acronyms, extending brand names to the realm of common nouns, ''blends'', ''clippings'', and extending the domain of derivational morphemes. (1). Compounding/Composition There are new words in English which are produced by combining two or more roots or stems. Compound words, though certainly fewer in quantity than root words or derived words, still represent one of the most typical and specific features of English word-structure. There are different kinds of compound words. Structurally, there are neutral compound words (eg. White-board, table-tennis, warm-hearted, TV programme, U-bomb,…), morphological compound words ( eg. Salesgirl, handicraft, speedometer, agro-forestry,…) and syntactical compound words (eg. Merry-go-round, good-for-nothing, forget-me- not, know-what, one-know-everything,…). Semantically, there are idiomatic compound words (eg. Red-tape, lady-bird, green-fly, blue- bottle,…) and non-idiomatic compound words (eg. School-boy, man- doctor, toy-train, room-mate, white-board-marker, ceiling- fan,…). - 51 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 Words like football, handbook, toothpick, White House, and lawn mover are compounds, which can be defined as words containing at least two roots. As you can see, compounds are sometimes spelled as single words, sometimes as word sequences. The meanings of a compound aren't always predictable from the meanings of its constituents, and therefore, dictionaries provide individual entries for compounds. For instance, girlfriend means more than just a friend who is a girl, sweetheart relies on metaphor to relate its form and its meaning, overlap can denote only a state, never an event (an overlap exists rather than happens), a firing squad is not just a squad that fires, but one that executes by firing, sandpaper has a narrower meaning than just ''paper with sand (on it), and both bag man and bag lady mean more than 'man (woman) with a bag''. A list of English compounds 1. Compound nouns a. Noun + Noun: bath towel; boyfriend; death blow b. Verb + Noun: pickpocket; breakfast c. Noun + Verb: nosebleed; sunshine d. Adjective + Noun: deep structure; fast-food e. Verb + Verb: make-believe f. Particle + Noun: in-crowd; downtown g. Adverb + Noun: now generation h. Verb + Particle: cop-out; dropout i. Phrase compounds: son-in-law 2. Compound verbs a. Noun + Verb: skydive b. Adjective + Verb: fine-tune c. Particle + Verb: overbook d. Adjective + Noun: brownbag 3. Compound adjectives a. Noun + Adjective: card-carrying; childproof b. Verb + Adjective: fail-safe - 52 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 c. Adjective + Adjective: open-ended d. Adverb + Adjective: cross-modal e. Particle + Adjective: overqualified f. Noun + Noun: coffee table g. Verb + Noun: roll-neck h. Adjective + Noun: red-brick; blue-collar i. Particle + Noun: in-depth j. Verb + Verb: go-go; make-believe k. Adjective/Adverb + Verb: high-rise l. Verb + Particle: see-through; tow-away 4. Compound adverbs Up-tightly cross-modally 5. Neoclassical compounds astronaut; hydroelectric; mechanophobe (2). Conversion (Zero-derivation) A word changes its class without any change of form, e.g., carpet becomes to carpet; hand becomes to hand, eye – to eye, back – to back, face – to face, comb – to comb, pen – to pen, brush – to brush, room – to room, table – to table, lunch – to lunch, cook – to cook, nurse – to nurse, dog – to dog, monkey – to monkey, fish – to fish, whale – to whale, bottle – to bottle, honey-moon – to honey-moon, yellow – to yellow, …. (3). Acronymy Another word-formation process turns word-initial letter sequences into ordinary words: laser from light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, NATO from North Atlantic Treaty Organization, WTO from World Tourism Organization, UNICEF from United Nations International Children’s Educational Fund, FAQ from frequently asked questions, CD-ROM from Compact Disc read-only memory, radar from radio detecting and ranging, etc. - 53 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 (4). Brand names This word-formation process turns brand names into common nouns, sometimes verbs: kleenex, xerox (n, v), scotch tape. (5). Blendings Two words merge into each other, e.g., brunch (breakfast + lunch), Chunnel (Channel + tunnel), telex (teleprinter + exchange), and motel (motor + hotel), smog (smoke + fog), bit (binary + digit), Eurovision (European + television), cyborg (cybernetic + organism), …. (6). Clippings This process creates an informal shortening of a word, often to a single syllable, e.g., ad, gents, flu, telly, phone, bus, lab, gas, maths, pants,…. (7). Extending the domain of derivational morphemes Another word-formation process is making a derivational morpheme more productive than it was. One frequently criticized example of this is the extension of -ize to create forms such as prioritize and containerize. This kind of word-creation is found frequently in a child's first language acquisition. 4.2. PHRASES A phrase is a level of structure between a word and a clause. In both traditional and more modern grammar a phrase often consists of two or more words that ‘go together’, eg. at the beginning, very young indeed, in the classroom. However, in traditional grammar (where a clause must contain a finite verb) phrases include what are now often classified as non-finite clauses (eg. having said that) or verbless clauses (eg. if possible). In modern grammar phrases are still defined in terms of form. But a phrase can consist of a single head-word; it could also contain a finite clause if that is dependent on the head-word. A phrase is an element of structure typically containing more than one word, but lacking the subject-predicate structure usually found in a clause. Phrases are classified into functional types related to word - 54 -  A Grammar of the English Language - 2015 class, such as noun phrases, verb phrases, adjective phrases, adverb phrases and preposition phrases. In generative grammar, the term has a broader sense as part of a general characterization of the first stage of sentence analysis – the phrase-structure part of a grammar. Traditionally, phrases are an extension of the single word parts of speech named accordingly: noun phrase, adjectival phrase, and adverbial phrase. The traditional definition of a phrase calls it ''a group of words that does not