Chapter 5 Grammar PDF

Chapter 5 Grammar Objectives: By the end of the chapter the students will have developed knowledge of the following: ✓ The traditional grammar. ✓ The difference between the prescriptive and descriptive approaches. ✓ The difference between the traditional, structur...

Chapter 5 Grammar Objectives: By the end of the chapter the students will have developed knowledge of the following: ✓ The traditional grammar. ✓ The difference between the prescriptive and descriptive approaches. ✓ The difference between the traditional, structural, and constituent analyses. 48 7 Grammar Dear Ann Landers, My husband recently ran for public office. He went to the local radio station to record an ad to be read on the air. The copy was written by someone at the station. One of the sentences was, “Me and my family will be moving to this town.” When I heard it on the air, I was shocked. My husband said, “that’s the way they wrote it. It didn’t sound right to me, either.” I immediately went to the station and challenged them. They said, “You are wrong.” We then telephoned a graduate of Northwestern University who was an English major. He said it could be either “I” or “me.” Am I an ignoramus? I was taught to diagram sentences when in doubt. It comes out, “Me will be moving.” Does this sound like correct English to you? Please settle it. Feeling Like a Fool. Quoted in Lakoff (1990) We have already considered two levels of description used in the study of language. We have described linguistic expressions as sequences of sounds that can be represented in the phonetic alphabet and described in terms of their features. Voiced fricative voiceless stop diphthong Figure 7.1 49  Grammar 81 We can take the same expression and describe it as a sequence of morphemes. the luck -y boy -s functional lexical derivational lexical inflectional With these descriptions, we could characterize all the words and phrases of a language in terms of their phonology and morphology. Grammar However, we have not accounted for the fact that these words can only be combined in a limited number of patterns. We recognize that the phrase the lucky boys is a well- formed phrase in English, but that the following two “phrases” are not at all well- formed. *boys the lucky *lucky boys the (We use an asterisk * to indicate that a form is unacceptable or ungrammatical.) From these examples, we can see that English has strict rules for combining words into phrases. The article (the) must go before the adjective (lucky), which must go before the noun (boys). So, in order to be grammatical, this type of phrase must have the sequence article + adjective + noun (and not *noun + article + adjective, for example). The process of describing the structure of phrases and sentences in such a way that we account for all the grammatical sequences in a language and rule out all the ungrammatical sequences is one way of defining grammar. It is the kind of definition assumed when we talk about the grammar of English as opposed to the grammar of Swahili, Tagalog or Turkish. As illustrated in Chapter 6, each of these languages has different ways of forming grammatical phrases and sentences. Studying grammar in this way has a very long tradition. Traditional grammar The terms “article,” “adjective” and “noun” that we used to label the grammatical categories of the words in the phrase the lucky boys come from traditional grammar, 50 82 The Study of Language which has its origins in the description of languages such as Latin and Greek. Since there were well-established grammatical descriptions of these languages, it seemed appropriate to adopt the existing categories from these descriptions and apply them in the analysis of “newer” languages such as English. After all, Latin and Greek were the languages of scholarship, religion, philosophy and “knowledge,” so the grammar of these languages was taken to be the model for other grammars. The best-known terms from that tradition are those used in describing the parts of speech. The parts of speech Terms such as “adjective” and “noun” are used to label forms in the language as the parts of speech or word classes. The technical terms used to describe each part of speech are illustrated in the following sentence and simple definitions of each term are listed below. The lucky boys found a backpack in article adjective noun verb article noun preposition the park and they opened it carefully article noun conjunction pronoun verb pronoun adverb Nouns are words used to refer to people (boy), objects (backpack), creatures (dog), places (school), qualities (roughness), phenomena (earth- quake) and abstract ideas (love) as if they were all “things.” Articles are words (a, an, the) used with nouns to form noun phrases classify- ing those “things” (You can have a banana or an apple) or identifying them as already known (I’ll take the apple). Adjectives are words used, typically with nouns, to provide more information about the things referred to (happy people, large objects, a strange experience). Verbs are words used to refer to various kinds of actions (go, talk) and states (be, have) involving people and things in events (Jessica is ill and has a sore throat so she can’t talk or go anywhere). Adverbs are words used, typically with verbs, to provide more information about actions, states and events (slowly, yesterday). Some adverbs (really, very) are also used with adjectives to modify information about things (Really large objects move slowly. I had a very strange experience yesterday). Prepositions are words (at, in, on, near, with, without) used with nouns in phrases providing information about time (at five o’clock, in the morning), 51 Grammar 83 place (on the table, near the window) and other connections (with a knife, without a thought) involving actions and things. Pronouns are words (she, herself, they, it, you) used in place of noun phrases, typically referring to people and things already known (She talks to herself. They said it belonged to you). Conjunctions are words (and, but, because, when) used to make connections and indicate relationships between events (Chantel’s husband was so sweet and he helped her a lot because she couldn’t do much when she was pregnant). Basic definitions of this type are useful for identifying most forms in a language such as English, but they are not completely reliable. A different approach might focus on some other properties of the parts of speech. For example, a noun can be defined as a form that comes after an article (a, the) and can take inflections for possessive (-’s) and plural (-s). Of course, not all nouns (e.g. information, mud) have all these character- istics. Moreover, these characteristics are unlikely to be true of nouns in other lan- guages that we might want to describe. As we shall see, an alternative way of looking at nouns and other parts of speech had to be found in order to carry out structural analysis. Agreement In addition to the terms used for the parts of speech, traditional grammatical analysis has also given us a number of other categories, including “number,” “person,” “tense,” “voice” and “gender.” These categories can be discussed in isolation, but their role in describing language structure becomes clearer when we consider them in terms of agreement. For example, we say that the verb loves “agrees with” the noun Cathy in the sentence Cathy loves her dog. This agreement is partially based on the category of number, that is, whether the noun is singular or plural. It is also based on the category of person, which covers the distinctions of first person (involving the speaker), second person (involving the hearer) and third person (involving any others). The different forms of English pro- nouns can be described in terms of person and number. We use I for first person singular, you for second person singular, and he, she, it (or Cathy) for third person singular. So, in the sentence Cathy loves her dog, we have a noun Cathy, which is third person singular, and we use the verb loves (not love) to “agree with” the noun. In addition, the form of the verb must be described in terms of another category called tense. In this case, the verb loves is in the present tense, which is different from 52 84 The Study of Language the past tense (loved). The sentence is also in the active voice, describing what Cathy does (i.e. she performs the action of the verb). An alternative would be the passive voice, which can be used to describe what happens to Cathy (i.e. she doesn’t perform the action), as in Cathy is loved by her dog or just Cathy is loved. Our final category is gender, which helps us describe the agreement between Cathy and her in our example sentence. In English, we have to describe this relationship in terms of natural gender, mainly derived from a biological distinction between male and female. The agreement between Cathy and her is based on a distinction made in English between reference to female entities (she, her), male entities (he, his) and things or creatures, when the sex is unknown or irrelevant (it, its). Grammatical gender The type of biological distinction used in English is quite different from the more common distinction found in languages that use grammatical gender. Whereas natural gender is based on sex (male and female), grammatical gender is based on the type of noun (masculine and feminine) and is not tied to sex. In this latter sense, nouns are classified according to their gender class and, typically, articles and adjec- tives have different forms to “agree with” the gender of the noun. Spanish, for example, has two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine, illustrated by the expressions el sol (“the sun”) and la luna (“the moon”). German uses three genders, masculine der Mond (“the moon”), feminine die Sonne (“the sun”) and neuter das Feuer (“the fire”). The different forms of the articles in both the Spanish (el or la) and German (der, die or das) examples correspond to differences in the gender class of the nouns. We should emphasize that this gender distinction is not based on a distinction in sex. A young girl is biologically “female,” but the German noun das Mädchen used to talk about her is grammatically neuter. The French noun in le livre (“the book”) is gram- matically masculine, but neither we nor the French people consider a book to be biologically male. So, the grammatical category of gender is very usefully applied in describing a number of languages (including Latin), but may not be appropriate for describing forms in other languages such as English. (For more on gender, see Chapter 20.) Traditional analysis The notion of “appropriateness” of analytic categories for a particular language has not always been a consideration. In traditional grammar books, tables such as the 53  Grammar 85 following were often presented for English verbs, constructed by analogy with similar tables of forms in Latin grammars. The forms for the Latin verb amare (“to love”) are listed on the right. First person singular (I) love amo Present tense, active voice Second person singular (you) love amas Third person singular (she) loves amat First person plural (we) love amamus Second person plural (you) love amatis Third person plural (they) love amant Each of the Latin verb forms is different, according to the categories of person and number, yet the English verb forms are (with one exception) mostly the same. Thus it makes sense, in describing a language such as Latin, to have all those descriptive categories to characterize verb forms, but they don’t really describe verb forms in English. In English, it makes more sense to say the categories describe different pro- nouns. The influence of Latin, however, goes beyond the types of descriptive labels. The prescriptive approach It is one thing to adopt the grammatical labels (e.g. “noun,” “verb”) to categorize words in English sentences; it is quite another thing to go on to claim that the structure of English sentences should be like the structure of sentences in Latin. That was an approach taken by a number of influential grammarians, mainly in eighteenth-century England, who set out rules for the “proper” use of English. This view of grammar as a set of rules for the “proper” use of a language is still to be found today and may be best characterized as the prescriptive approach. Some familiar examples of prescriptive rules for English sentences are: You must not split an infinitive. You must not end a sentence with a preposition. Following these types of rules, traditional teachers would correct sentences like Who did you go with? to With whom did you go? (making sure that the preposition with was not at the end of the sentence). And Mary runs faster than me would be corrected to Mary runs faster than I. And Me and my family would certainly have to be corrected to My family and I, as Ann Landers would recommend. And, in proper English writing, one should never begin a sentence with and! 54 86 The Study of Language It may, in fact, be a valuable part of one’s education to be made aware of this “linguistic etiquette” for the proper use of the language. If it is a social expectation that someone who writes well should obey these prescriptive rules, then social judg- ments such as “poorly educated” may be made about someone who does not follow these rules. However, it is worth considering the origins of some of these rules and asking whether they are appropriately applied to the English language. Let’s take one example: “You must not split an infinitive.” Captain Kirk’s infinitive The infinitive in English has the form to + the base form of the verb, as in to go, and can be used with an adverb such as boldly. At the beginning of each televised Star Trek episode, one of the main characters, Captain Kirk, always used the expression To boldly go … This is an example of a split infinitive. Captain Kirk’s teacher might have expected him to say To go boldly or Boldly to go, so that the adverb didn’t split the infinitive. If Captain Kirk had been a Roman space traveler, speaking Latin, he would have used the expressions ire (“to go”) and audacter (“boldly”). Now, in saying Ire audacter … in Latin, Capitaneus Kirkus would not even have the opportunity to split his infinitive (ire), because Latin infinitives are single words and just do not split. It would be very appropriate in Latin grammar to say you cannot split an infinitive. But is it appropriate to carry this idea over into English where the infinitive form does not consist of a single word, but of two words, to and go? If it is a typical feature of the use of English that speakers and writers regularly produce forms such as to boldly go, to solemnly swear or to never ever say goodbye, then we may simply wish to note that there are structures in English that differ from those found in Latin, rather than think of the English forms as “bad” because they are breaking a rule of Latin grammar. The descriptive approach It may be that using a well-established grammatical description of Latin is a useful guide for some European languages (e.g. Italian or Spanish), is less useful for others (e.g. English), and may be absolutely misleading if you are trying to describe some non-European languages. This last point became clear to those linguists who were trying to describe the structure of the native languages of North America toward the end of the nineteenth century. The categories and rules that were appropriate for Latin grammar just did not seem to fit these languages. As a consequence, for most of the twentieth century, a rather different approach was adopted. Analysts collected sam- ples of the language they were interested in and attempted to describe the regular 55 Grammar 87 structures of the language as it was used, not according to some view of how it should be used. This is called the descriptive approach. Structural analysis One type of descriptive approach is called structural analysis and its main concern is to investigate the distribution of forms in a language. The method involves the use of “test-frames” that can be sentences with empty slots in them. For example: The _______________ makes a lot of noise. I heard a _______________ yesterday. There are a lot of forms that can fit into these slots to produce good grammatical sentences of English (e.g. car, child, donkey, dog, radio). As a result, we can propose that because all these forms fit in the same test-frame, they are likely to be examples of the same grammatical category. The label we give to this grammatical category is, of course, “noun.” However, there are many forms that do not fit those test-frames. Examples would be Cathy, someone, the dog, a car, and many others. (That is, we wouldn’t say *The Cathy … or *The the dog … here.) For these forms, we require different test-frames, which could look like this: _______________ makes a lot of noise. I heard _______________ yesterday. Among the other forms that comfortably fit these test-frames are it, the big dog, an old car, Ani Difranco, the professor with the Scottish accent, and many more. Once again, we can suggest that these forms are likely to be examples of the same grammatical category. The common label for this category is “noun phrase.” Observing that it fits in this second set of test-frames, and not in the first set (*The it makes a lot of noise), allows us to improve on the older, Latin-influenced, analysis of pronouns in English. In the older analysis, pronouns were described as “words used in place of nouns.” We can now see that it is more accurate to say that pronouns are used in place of noun phrases (not just nouns). By developing a set of test-frames of this type and discovering which forms fit the slots in the test-frames, we can produce a descrip- tion of (at least some) aspects of the sentence structures of a language. 56 88 The Study of Language Constituent analysis An approach with the same descriptive aims is called constituent analysis. The technique employed in this approach is designed to show how small constituents (or components) in sentences go together to form larger constituents. One basic step is determining how words go together to form phrases. In the following sentence, we can identify nine constituents at the word level: An old man brought a shotgun to the wedding. How do those nine constituents go together to form constituents at the phrase level? Does it seem appropriate to put the words together as follows? An old man brought brought a shotgun to to the We don’t normally think of these combinations as phrases in English. We are more likely to say that the phrase-like constituents here are combinations of the following types: an old man, a shotgun, the wedding, which are noun phrases; to the wedding, which is a prepositional phrase; and brought a shotgun, which is a verb phrase. This analysis of the constituent structure of the sentence can be represented in different types of diagrams. One type of diagram simply shows the distribution of the constituents at different levels. An old man brought a shotgun to the wedding Figure 7.2 Using this kind of diagram we can determine the types of forms that can be substituted for each other at different levels of constituent structure. One advantage of this type of analysis is that it shows rather clearly that proper nouns or names (Gwen, Kingston) and pronouns (I, him, her), though they are single words, can be used as noun phrases and fill the same constituent space as longer phrases (e.g. an old man). An old man brought a shotgun to the wedding The woman kept a large snake in a cage Gwen took Kingston with her I saw him recently Figure 7.3 57 Grammar 89 Labeled and bracketed sentences An alternative type of diagram is designed to show how the constituents in sentence structure can be marked off by using labeled brackets. The first step is to put brackets (one on each side) round each constituent, and then more brackets round each combination of constituents. For example: [The] [dog] [loved] [the] [girl] Figure 7.4 With this procedure, the different constituents of the sentence are shown at the word level [the] or [dog], at the phrase level [the dog] or [loved the girl], and at the sentence level [The dog loved the girl]. We can then label each constituent using these abbreviated grammatical terms: Art (= article) V (= verb) N (= noun) VP (= verb phrase) NP (= noun phrase) S (= sentence) In the next diagram, these labels are placed beside each bracket that marks the beginning of a constituent. The result is a labeled and bracketed analysis of the constituent structure of the sentence. S VP NP NP Art N V Art N [The] [dog] [loved] [the] [girl] Figure 7.5 In performing this type of analysis, we have not only labeled all the constituents, we have revealed the hierarchical organization of those constituents. In this hierarchy, the sentence (S) is higher than and contains the noun phrase (NP). The noun phrase 58 90 The Study of Language (NP) is higher than and contains the noun (N). We can also see that the sentence (S) contains a verb phrase (VP) which contains a verb (V) and another noun phrase (NP). We will return to the important concept of hierarchical organization in grammatical structure in the next chapter. Before moving on, however, we should note that constituent analysis is not only useful for describing the structure of English sentences. We can take a sample sentence from a language with a grammatical structure that is really quite different from English and apply the same type of analysis. A Gaelic sentence Here is a sentence from Scottish Gaelic which would be translated as “The boy saw the black dog.” Chunnaic an gille an cu dubh saw the boy the dog black One very obvious difference between the structure of this Gaelic sentence and its English counterpart is the fact that the verb comes first in the sentence. Another noticeable feature is that, when an adjective is used, it goes after the noun and not before it. We can represent these structural observations in a labeled and bracketed diagram. S NP NP V Art N Art N Adj [Chunnaic] [an] [gille] [an] [cu] [dubh] Figure 7.6 The diagram makes it clear that this Gaelic sentence is organized with a V NP NP structure, which is rather different from the NP V NP structure we found in the English sentence analyzed earlier. It is not, of course, the aim of this type of analysis that we should be able to draw complicated-looking diagrams in order to impress our friends. The aim is to make explicit, via the diagram, what we believe to be the structure of grammatical sentences in the language. It also enables us to describe clearly how English sentences are put together as combinations of phrases which, in turn, are combinations of words. We 59 Grammar 91 can then look at similar descriptions of sentences in other languages such as Gaelic, Japanese or Spanish and see clearly what structural differences exist. At a very practical level, it may help us understand why a Spanish learner of English produces phrases like *the wine red (instead of the red wine), using a structural organization of constituents that is possible in Spanish, but not in English. 60 92 The Study of Language Study questions 1 Identify all the parts of speech used in this sentence (e.g. woman = noun): The woman kept a large snake in a cage, but it escaped recently. 2 What is the difference between grammatical gender and natural gender? 3 What prescriptive rules for the “proper” use of English are not obeyed in the following sentences and how would they be “corrected”? (i) The old theory consistently failed to fully explain all the data. (ii) I can’t remember the name of the person I gave the book to. 4 What was wrong with the older Latin-influenced definition of English pronouns? 5 Given these other Gaelic words, translate the following sentences into English. mor (“big”) beag (“small”) bhuail (“hit”) duine (“man”) (i) Bhuail an gille beag an cu dubh. (ii) Chunnaic an cu an duine mor. 6 Create a labeled and bracketed analysis of this sentence: The thief stole a wallet. Tasks A Another term used in the description of the parts of speech is “determiner.” What are determiners? How many examples were included in this chapter? B In this chapter, we discussed “correction” in grammar. What is hypercorrection? C What is aspect? How is it used in the description of the underlined forms in these sentences? (1) I hope no one calls while I’m eating lunch. (2) She’s writing a story about her dog. (3) I’ve eaten lunch already, thanks. (4) She’s written a story about her cat and the cat next door. (5) I was eating lunch, so I didn’t answer. (6) She had written a story about her goldfish before that. (7) As a child, she used to write stories about the insects in the garden. D What is the basis of the categorization of English verbs as transitive, intransitive or ditransitive? Can you use this categorization to explain why these sentences are ungrammatical? (1) *I thought I had lost my sunglasses, but Ali found in his car. (2) *Mark didn’t win, but he didn’t care that. (3) *They had a problem so we discussed. (4) *Suzy needed a jacket so I lent mine. 61