Nouns

The general term ‘noun’ is applied to a grammatically distinct word class in a language having the following properties:

(a) It contains amongst its most central members those words that denote persons or concrete objects.

(b) Its members head phrases – noun phrases – which characteristically function as subject or object in clause structure and refer to the participants in the situation described in the clause, to the actor, patient, recipient, and so on.

(c) It is the class to which the categories of number, gender and case have their primary application in languages which have these grammatical categories. The ‘primary’ application of these categories is to be distinguished from their ‘secondary’ application, as when they are attributable to a rule of agreement. Number in English, for example, applies both to nouns and (in combination with person) to verbs, so that we may contrast, say, The dog bites and The dogs bite. But it applies here primarily to dog and secondarily to bite because the verb takes its (person–) number property from the subject – and the reason we put it this way rather than the other way round is that the semantic distinction is a matter of how many dogs are involved, not how many acts of biting.

General definition

At the general level, ‘verb’ is applied to a grammatically distinct word class in a language having the following properties:

(a) It contains amongst its most central members the morphologically simplest words denoting actions, processes or events; in predications of these types at least, the word functioning as head of the predicate expression will normally belong to the class we call verb.

(b) Members of the class carry inflections of tense, aspect and mood if the language has these as inflectional categories.

Reference to morphological complexity is needed in (a) because we find countless verb/noun pairs denoting the same action, etc. – cf. the earlier example of destroy/destruction: what we are saying in (a) is that with such examples the noun will normally be derived from the verb rather than the other way round. Compare also pairs like catchv/catchN, where on semantic grounds we take the verb to be more basic. Many verbs in English and other languages denote states (cf. know, like, etc.) and traditional definitions of the verb generally use some such formula as ‘action or state’; given the concept of general definition that we have introduced, however, it is better to omit states: ‘state’ will figure, rather, in the general definition of adjectives, for with verbs there are more words denoting actions, processes, events than states, whereas with adjectives the situation is very much the reverse.

The description of a language comprises three major components: phonology, grammar and lexicon. The phonology describes the sound system: consonants, vowels, stress, intonation, and so on. The two most basic units of grammar are the word and the sentence: one subcomponent of grammar, called morphology, deals with the form of words, while the other, called syntax, deals with the way words combine to form sentences. The lexicon – or dictionary, to use a more familiar term – lists the vocabulary items, mainly words and idioms (such as red herring, give up, and so on), specifying how they are pronounced, how they behave grammatically, and what they mean. In this book we will confine our attention to the grammar, with only occasional passing mention of phonological and lexical matters.

On another dimension we can distinguish between the study of linguistic form and the study of meaning: all three of the major components are concerned with aspects of both. The special term semantics is applied to the study of meaning, and we can accordingly distinguish phonological semantics (covering such matters as the meanings expressed by stress and intonation), grammatical semantics (dealing with the meanings associated with grammatical categories such as past tense, interrogative clause, and so on) and lexical semantics (the meanings of vocabulary items).

The relation between form and meaning in grammar is by no means straightforward. This is one of the issues we shall need to consider in this introductory chapter, where the aim is to explain briefly the model or framework of grammatical description that we shall be using in the book and the methodological approach adopted.

A verb, we have seen, functions as head of a VP, which prototypically enters into construction with a subject to form a clause. In this chapter we will deal with these two layers of structure: the VP and the clause. As both are headed, immediately or ultimately, by the verb, it is convenient to take the two together – and for simplicity we will subsume both under the heading of clause structure; indeed, as we shall see towards the end of the chapter, it is arguable that we need more than two layers of structure with the verb as ultimate head. We will confine our attention, apart from the occasional aside, to kernel clauses.

Subject and predicate

The first division we make in the analysis of kernel clauses, then, is into subject and predicate. Thus in an elementary example like

(1) Your father washed the car again

your father functions as the subject of the clause and washed the car again as the predicate.

We will initially consider the subject function at the language-particular level: its general definition will be discussed in §4, along with that of the object and predicative. In English the subject is distinguished grammatically from other functions in the clause by a whole cluster of properties, most notably the following:

(a) Form class. The prototypical subject is an NP: there is no predicate that cannot take an NP as subject.

This chapter will be primarily concerned with the semantics of the tense inflections and of certain aspectual and modal catenatives; in addition we will consider, in the light of this semantic discussion and of what has already been said about the grammar, the nature of tense, aspect and mood/modality as general linguistic categories.

Tense

We begin with the inflectional category of tense, examining in turn the various uses of the present and past tenses in English.

1.1 Present tense

The following uses of the present tense may be distinguished:

(a) Present time situations

1. i Kim lives in Berlin

2. ii Kim plays defensively forward

3. iii Kim washes her hair with Zoom shampoo

The primary use of the present tense is to locate the situation in present time – where ‘situation’ is to be understood as a general term covering states, actions, processes or whatever is described in the clause, and present time is the time of the utterance. Situations can be classified as either static (states of affairs, relations, etc.) or dynamic (actions, processes, events, etc.). Static situations will be understood to extend beyond the moment of utterance: Kim's living in Berlin, for example, has much greater duration than an utterance of (li). Dynamic situations are by contrast understood to be effectively simultaneous with the utterance: (ii), for example, might be used in a running commentary on a cricket match.

Thematic variation

The thematic systems of the clause are those where corresponding members of the contrasting classes (such as active My father wrote the letter and passive The letter was written by my father) are prototypically thematic variants. Thematic variants have the same propositional content, but differ in the way it is ‘packaged’ as a message. We select one rather than another from a pair or larger set of thematic variants depending on which part(s) of the message we wish to give prominence to, on what we regard the message as being primarily about, on what parts of it we assume the addressee already knows, on what contrasts, if any, we wish to make, and so on.

The general definition given above makes reference to prototypes because the corresponding clauses are not invariably thematic variants. For example, active The Head willingly made Kim convenor and passive Kim was willingly made convenor by the Head are not thematic variants because the passive, unlike the active, allows an interpretation where it is a matter of willingness on the part of Kim rather than the Head. But such cases are relatively exceptional: normally the switch from active to passive leaves the propositional meaning intact, and similarly with other thematic systems.

Not all thematic variation is attributable to differences between the terms of a grammatical system.

This book is intended as an introductory text for courses in English grammar at tertiary level. It offers an outline account of the most important and central grammatical constructions and categories in English. I have assumed only minimal prior familiarity with the structure of English: all the grammatical terminology used is systematically explained. The analysis draws on the descriptive and theoretical advances made in modern linguistics, and for this reason the book could be used for an elementary course on English within a linguistics programme. It is, however, intended for a wider audience: for any course aiming to present a descriptive overview of the structure of English. Significant departures from traditional grammar in analysis or terminology are pointed out, normally in footnotes.

One distinctive feature of the book is that it discusses the major grammatical categories at both a language-particular and a general level. The language-particular account gives the distinctive grammatical properties of the various categories as they apply to English: it thus provides the criteria for determining whether some word is a noun, verb, adjective, adverb or whatever, whether some verb-form is a past participle, a past tense form, etc., whether some clause is declarative, interrogative, imperative, exclamative – and so on. Analysis at the general level is concerned with what is common to the categories across languages, thus providing criteria for the application of the same terms in the grammars of different languages.

Overview

In the previous chapter, we argued that sentences are not just unstructured sequences of sounds; rather, they have a hierarchical constituent structure in which sounds are grouped together into words, words into phrases, and phrases into sentences. Each constituent (word or phrase) in a sentence belongs to a specific syntactic category. The categorial constituent structure of sentences can be represented in the form of a Phrase-marker, in which the different nodes are labelled according to the category of the constituent they represent. But what are Phrase-markers? What kind of rules might we devise to generate (i.e. tell us how to form) Phrase-markers? And what exactly is the nature of the categories which are used to label the various constituents which Phrase-markers contain? These are the three essential questions which we address in this chapter.

The nature of Phrase-markers

In the previous chapter, we used Phrase-markers to represent the constituent structure of sentences. But what exactly is a Phrase-marker? It's useful to think about this problem for a while, and to devise some appropriate technical terminology for describing the internal structure of P-markers, since this will turn out to be of vital importance in subsequent chapters. But why do we need technical jargon? Well, any adequate description of any phenomenon in any field of enquiry (in our present case, Syntax) must be maximally explicit, and to be explicit, it must be formal – i.e. make use only of theoretical constructs which have definable formal properties.

Overview

Most of our discussion in the previous two chapters has been concerned with providing empirical substantiation for the claim that sentences are hierarchically structured out of constituents belonging to a restricted (perhaps universal) set of categories, and with considering the nature of categories. Implicitly, we postulated a two-level Theory of Categories: that is to say, we tacitly assumed that there are two levels of categories in natural language, namely

1. (1) (i) word-level categories, e.g.

2. N = Noun; V = Verb; A = Adjective; P = Preposition;

3. ADV = Adverb; M = Modal; D = Determiner, etc.

4. (ii) phrase-level categories, e.g.

5. NP = Noun Phrase; VP = Verb Phrase; AP = Adjectival Phrase; PP = Prepositional Phrase; ADVP = Adverbial Phrase, etc.

In this chapter and the next, however, we are going to argue that our existing Theory of Categories should be extended to include a third type of category intermediate between word-level and phrase-level categories. That is to say, we are going to argue in favour of positing that there are nominal constituents larger than the Noun but smaller than a full Noun Phrase, verbal constituents larger than the Verb but smaller than a full Verb Phrase, adjectival constituents larger than the Adjective but smaller than a full Adjectival Phrase … and so on.

Overview

In the previous two chapters, we discussed in some detail the motivation for (and operation of) the five transformations listed in (1) below:

1. (1) (i) V movement (moves V out of VP into an empty finite I)

2. (ii) I movement (moves an I containing an Auxiliary into an empty C)

3. (iii) NP movement (moves an NP into an empty NP position)

4. (iv) extraposition (adjoins a PP or CP (S-bar) to the minimal XP containing the Phrase out of which it moves)

5. (v) WH movement (moves a wh-phrase into an empty C-specifier position to the left of C-bar)

In this chapter, we begin by looking at a number of other transformations. We then go on to argue that there are many important similarities between the various different transformations we have looked at, and we explore the possibility of conflating all the various different transformations together into a single rule of alpha movement. We also suggest that there are a number of general principles which determine the operations that movement rules can and cannot perform in natural language grammars, the ways in which they apply, how they interact, etc., and we take a look at some of the relevant principles involved.

Other movement rules

After reading the previous chapter, you're probably convinced that transformational grammarians are obsessive wh-paranoiacs (who see the ghosts of wh-phrases lurking in the inner recesses of even the most un-wh-like structures)! So, let me redress the balance somewhat by looking briefly at a few structures which appear to involve movement rules other than WH movement.