Given the length and nature of this book, there will be relatively few readers who begin at the beginning and work their way through the chapters in order to the end. We envisage, rather, that readers will typically be reading individual chapters, or parts there of, without having read all that precedes, and the main purpose of this syntactic overview is to enable the separate chapters to be read in the context of the grammar as a whole.

We begin by clarifying the relation between sentence and clause, and then introduce the distinction between canonical and non-canonical clauses, which plays an important role in the organisation of the grammar. The following sections then survey very briefly the fifteen chapters that deal with syntax (as opposed to morphology or punctuation), noting especially features of our analysis that depart from traditional grammar.

Sentence and clause

Syntax is concerned with the way words combine to form sentences. The sentence is the largest unit of syntax, while the word is the smallest. The structure of composite words is also a matter of grammar (of morphology rather than syntax), but the study of the relations between sentences within a larger text or discourse falls outside the domain of grammar. Such relations are different in kind from those that obtain within a sentence, and are outside the scope of this book.

We take sentences, like words, to be units which occur sequentially in texts, but are not in general contained one within another. Compare:

1. [1] i Jill seems quite friendly.

2. ii I think Jill seems quite friendly.

3. iii Jill seems quite friendly, but her husband is extremely shy.

Jill seems quite friendly is a sentence in [i], but not in [ii–iii], where it is merely part of a sentence – just as in all three examples friend is part of a word, but not itself a word.

In all three examples Jill seems quite friendly is a clause. This is the term we apply to a syntactic construction consisting (in the central cases) of a subject and a predicate. In [1ii] one clause is contained, or embedded, within a larger one, for we likewise have a subject–predicate relation between I and think Jill seems quite friendly.

This book aims to bridge the large gap that exists between traditional grammar and the partial descriptions of English grammar proposed by those working in the field of linguistics. We do not assume any familiarity with theoretical linguistics on the part of the reader and aim for as comprehensive a coverage as space allows, but we have made significant changes to the traditional analysis to take account of the progress that has been made by linguists in our understanding of English grammar.

The task of producing a new grammar of English that incorporates asmany as possible of the insights achieved in modern linguistics is too great for two people, and we are fortunate to have been able to enlist the help of a team of distinguished linguists. A grammar, however, requires a very high degree of integration between the parts, so that it would not have been possible simply to put together a collection of papers by different scholars writing within their area of specialisation. Instead, one or both of us have worked closely with the other contributors in co-authoring the chapters concerned: we are grateful to them for their willingness to engage in this somewhat unusual kind of collaboration. They are not of course to be held responsible for any shortcomings in the description relating to topics whose primary coverage is in other chapters than those that bear their names.

The lengthy business of producing this grammar has occupied one of us (RDH) for over a decade, most of it full-time, and the other (GKP) part-time for over six years. Naturally, many intellectual and personal debts have piled up during the lengthy process of research, consultation, collaboration, writing, revising, and editing. We cannot hope to convey the full extent of these debts, but we will attempt to sketch the outlines of those that are the most central.

The project has benefited from the support and advice provided by a group of eminent linguists who served as a Board of Consultants: Barry Blake, Bernard Comrie, Greville Corbett, Edward Finegan, John Lyons, Peter Matthews, Keith Mitchell, Frank Palmer, John Payne, Neil Smith, Roland Sussex, and the late James D. McCawley.

This chapter is concerned with one of the three major classes of finite subordinate clause; the other two classes, relative and comparative clauses, are covered in the next two chapters, while non-finite subordinate clauses are the topic of Ch. 14.

Subordinate clauses

A subordinate clause characteristically functions as dependent within some larger construction:

1. [1] i [The book she recommended] is out of print.

2. ii He [knows that she is right].

3. iii [Although the paper is poorly written,]it contains some excellent ideas.

The underlined clause is modifier of the noun book in [i], complement of knows in [ii], and complement of although in [iii]. Note that in [iii] it contains some excellent ideas is a clause contained within a larger construction (the clause that forms the whole sentence), but it has the function of head, and hence is a main clause, not a subordinate one.

◼ Marking of subordination

Subordination is very often marked by some feature in the internal structure of the clause:

1. [2] i It is clear [that he made a mistake].

2. ii They interviewed all those [she mentioned in her affidavit].

3. iii She's asking [how many copies we will want].

One very simple case is illustrated in [i], where that serves directly to mark the clause as subordinate. In [ii] it is the absence of the understood object that distinguishes the subordinate clause from a main clause. And in [iii] what marks the clause as subordinate is the combination of a prenuclear interrogative phrase and the subject + predicator order, for the corresponding main clause has subject–auxiliary inversion (How many copies will we want?).

Not all subordinate clauses are structurally marked as such

English does not require that subordination be marked in the structure of the subordinate clause itself. In He knows she is right, for example, the underlined clause is subordinate by virtue of functioning as complement to know but it is structurally identical to the main clause She is right. We examine the conditions under which the marking is omissible in §3.1.

Introduction

In Chapter 2, we studied the Noun Phrase from two points of view. First, from a phrase-external perspective, we discussed the contexts in which NP is found, and introduced subtheories that account for NP distribution. We then examined the internal structure of the phrase, describing the basic structural and functional relations among constituents that co-occur with a noun to form NP (or DP). In this chapter and in Chapter 4, we will consider these same issues with respect to the Verb Phrase (VP). We will begin the discussion in this chapter with an overview of the distribution of VP, and provide a preliminary description of principles that account for this distribution (Section 3.2). We will see that there are two grammatical relations that restrict the distribution of VP: the relation between VP and the clausal subject, and the relation between VP and Tense. Subsequent sections of this chapter will be concerned with relations between the head of the phrase and its arguments. Section 3.3 discusses the external argument, or subject; Sections 3.4–3.7 describe complements or internal arguments. Although we will not provide a detailed account of the properties of verbal arguments, we will see that the subtheories introduced in Chapter 2 provide a means of structurally distinguishing verbal arguments from non-arguments. In Chapter 4, we will take up several additional issues related to the structure of the Verb Phrase, including how clitics and auxiliary verbs are related to the verb and its arguments.

Introduction

The extent of Modern Spanish

Modern Spanish is spoken by just under 300 million people world-wide, and is thus one of the three or four most widely spoken languages, after Mandarin Chinese, English and possibly Hindi. Spanish is the primary or official language in numerous countries, including Spain and its dependencies, Equatorial Guinea, eighteen countries of Central and South America, and the US protectorate of Puerto Rico. Spanish is robust as a first or second language in many areas of the southwestern United States, as well as in other agricultural areas of the US, and urban areas such as Miami and New York. According to the 1990 census, about 17.3 million people over the age of five speak Spanish at home in the US.

Many countries in which Spanish is the official or primary language are linguistically diverse, with bilingualism a common, but not universal, phenomenon. In the north of Spain, primary languages include Basque, Catalan and Galician. In Latin America, many indigenous languages are used alongside Spanish. In Bolivia, for example, at least half the population speaks either Aymara or Quechua natively, and it is estimated that 40% of these speakers do not speak Spanish (Grimes 1988:85–87; Kurian 1992:184). In Paraguay, Guaraní is spoken by over 3 million speakers, with a majority of rural speakers being monolingual (Grimes 1988:125). Relatively large populations of speakers of indigenous languages are also found in Peru (Ayacucho Quechua and Cuzco Quechua), Guatemala (Mayan languages) and Ecuador (Quichua). Many other indigenous languages are spoken, by populations numbering from dozens of speakers to tens of thousands.