Let us begin by considering the question, “What do you know about the English language?” Any grammatical categories or principles that we discover and describe throughout this book will derive from answers to that question. The first thing that you know about English is what is not English. For instance, is the matter cited in 1.1 English?
1.1
Una palabra se muere cuando se pronuncia, dicen.
A mí, me parece que sólo en ese momento empieza a vivir.
Again the answer is, No. It looks a bit more like English than the Arabic because it uses a similar alphabet, but it has accent marks on some letters and the letters do not spell English words or sound like English when read aloud. You may recognize it as Spanish.
I. PRONUNCIATION / SPELLING
So we are interested in explaining how someone who knows English is able to recognize written or spoken samples of language as not English. But consider the next example. Look at it, read it aloud, then ask the same question: Is it English?
1.2
uh yord es beb yim ick es reg, fum shay
oy shay ick chisp dibins po creeze vop fay
If you have to answer Yes or No, the answer must be No. But there is something about 1.2 that sets it off the Spanish in 1.1). That is because 1.2 sounds like English when it is read aloud, and sort of looks like English as it is spelled.
This brings us to the next thing (besides recognizing what is not English) that you know about English: You know how to pronounce and spell English. (Language scholars use the term “phonology” to refer to the English pronunciation system, and they use the term “orthography” to refer to its spelling system.)
Your knowledge of English phonology is not limited to knowing just which consonant and vowel sounds occur in English; it also includes an intuitive knowledge of just how English arranges sounds one after the other to make English-sounding syllables.
II. WORD FORMATION
Now let’s look at yet another example of language and return to our original question: Is this English?
1.3
just dead live say said begins is
word day a some that it I to when
If we must answer, Yes or No, it seems that Yes is now the appropriate answer, although it is not an unqualified Yes. The two lines in 1.3 are like the lines in 1.2 in that they too have only English sounds (and letters) arranged into syllables that sound (and are spelled) using English patterns. That is, these lines fully conform to the principles of English phonology / orthography. But whereas 1.2 used English sounds and letters to represent meaningless syllables, 1.3 is composed of syllables that make up completely meaningful English words. When English-sounding syllables take on symbolic meanings, i.e., when they are in fact words, then linguistic principles that go beyond phonology are operative: the principles that govern the formation of English words. (Linguists use the term “morphology” to refer to the study of word formation in a language.)
There is nothing to be said about the meanings of the “words” in 1.2 because they are not in fact words and do not have meanings -- the spaces in 1.2 do not really separate words, but only English-sounding syllables.
As someone who knows English, you know when English-sounding syllables are in fact symbolic and when they are not. Any sequence of English sounds that has a consistently identifiable meaning associated with it is called a morpheme. Some morphemes, like dead, are also independent words; others, like the -d in said or the -s in begins, can occur only as parts of words.
You know, for instance, that the present tense form of the verb begin must place the -s that indicates present time at the end and not at the beginning of the word. If the spelling sbegin had occurred in 1.3 it would have seemed in some ways as nonsensical as the spellings in 1.2. You also know that you can change the noun day into an adjective by placing -ly at the end of it, producing daily, but not by putting -ly at the beginning of it; i.e., you know that lyday is not an English word. In knowing English, you know the list of its morphemes (how to pronounce them, how to spell them, and what they mean), and you also know how they must be ordered (i.e., morpheme patterns) when two or more of them occur in a word. These two types of knowledge, together, constitute your knowledge of English morphology.
III. GRAMMAR
Your knowledge of the principles of English pronunciation (phonology) and English word formation (morphology) is only part of what you know about the English language. Look what happened when one of the greatest poets of the English language took the same words listed in 1.3 and, using a few of them twice, arranged them in the following way:
1.4
A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.
-- Emily Dickinson
The question that has governed the discussion in this chapter (Is this English?) can now be answered with an unqualified, even resounding, Yes. But what characteristics does 1.4 have that the very same words in 1.3 lacked? Here is a reprinting of 1.3 to make it easier for you to compare the two and see how they differ:
1.5
just dead live say said begins is
word day a some that it I to when
An answer that readily comes to mind is that the words in 1.4 are arranged into English sentences, whereas the words in 1.3 are not. But that answer really begs the question, which can be reformulated as, What in fact is a sentence? A sentence is an arrangement of words where the words act on one another, specifying and even changing one another's meanings, and thus expressing relationships and connections among the entities to which the words refer. The principles that specify exactly how to arrange words so that they express such relationships, and thus qualify as sentences, are the principles of English syntax. (The term “grammar” is often said to refer to morphology as well as syntax, but I use the term “grammar” in this book more or less interchangeably with the term “syntax.”)
And such reflection should lead to the kind of question that will be the main focus of our attention in this book: What, exactly, did Emily Dickinson know about the English language that made it possible for her to arrange those English words in just such a way that they could express all of those relational ideas, and what exactly do you and I know that made it possible for us to understand all of those relational ideas when we read her poem? We must obviously know more than the principles of English pronunciation and English word formation.
The first thing we must know in order to create and understand English sentences is how words are grouped into categories according to what they do in sentences. These syntactic categories are called parts of speech, and some of the terms such as noun, verb, adjective, adverb, personal pronoun, preposition, indefinite article, demonstrative article, subordinating conjunction, passive auxiliary, and infinitive marker, are in fact names of parts of speech. The first task of syntactic description is thus to discover the set of parts of speech that exist in English and to assign English words to their appropriate part-of-speech categories. The second task of syntactic description is to state the patterns of arrangement of parts of speech in phrases of various types and the patterns of arrangement of phrases into clauses and ultimately into sentences.
There is an additional dimension to syntactic description that category labels such as those in the previous paragraph do not address, and it is this: The positions of each word in each phrase and of each phrase in each clause are also precisely determined and defined by syntactic principles.
Here is what you and I know about how to construct meaningful sentences in English: (a) the part of speech of every word in our vocabulary, (b) the positions each of those words can occupy in English phrases, (c) the kinds of phrases English has, and (d) the positions of each of those phrases in clauses or other phrases. The two sentences in the poem in 1.4 expressed meaningful relationships because the words were arranged in accordance with the principles of English grammar that everyone who speaks English knows intuitively, whereas the words in the random lists in 1.3 did not express meaningful relationships because they were not arranged in accordance with those principles.
It is one thing to know intuitively how to arrange words into phrases and phrases into clauses; it is an entirely different thing to be able to apply a particular set of grammatical labels to words, phrases, and clauses. Unfortunately, the term “grammar” is commonly applied to both types of knowledge: On the one hand, we can say that anyone who can speak and understand English knows English grammar, but on the other hand, we often say that someone “knows her grammar” when she can label the parts of speech of words and describe their functions in phrases and clauses, etc. We should thus keep in mind the two senses of the word “grammar,” in talking about the degree to which someone “knows” English grammar. Everyone who can use English fully and effectively “knows grammar” in the first, intuitive, sense; but only someone who has mastered a particular system of grammatical labeling “knows grammar” in the second, academic, sense.
One knows English grammar in the second sense described in the previous paragraph when one can answer two questions about each word, phrase, or clause in an English sentence: (a) What kind of word, or phrase, or clause is it? (This is its form.) and (b) What position does it occupy in a higher structure? (This is its function.) In 1.5 you will find the answers to these questions as they relate to the complex sentence A word is dead when it is said. Please note that the phrase "complex sentence" is the formal label for the whole sentence. Within that sentence there are four functional positions, each listed on its own line and labeled in all upper case letters. The labels for the formal categories that occupy those functional positions are given next to the functional labels; these are in lower case letters. The word or words to which both types of labels simultaneously apply are given inside of parentheses.
1.5
complex sentence (A word is dead when it is said.)
SUBJECT noun phrase (a word)
PREDICATER linking verb phrase (is)
SUBJECT COMPLEMENT adjective phrase (dead)
CLAUSE COMPLEMENT adverbial clause (when it is said)
The display in 1.5 thus asserts, for example, that the phrase a word is formally a noun phrase that occupies the SUBJECT position in the complex sentence A word is dead when it is said. The subject noun phrase could be further analyzed as in 1.7.
1.6
noun phrase (a word)
DETERMINER indefinite article (a)
HEAD noun (word)
The display in 1.6 thus asserts, for example, that the word a is formally an indefinite article (that is its part-of-speech label), and that it occupies the DETERMINER position in the noun phrase a word. The CLAUSE COMPLEMENT adverbial clause listed in the last line of 1.7 could be further analyzed as in 1.7.
1.7
adverbial clause (when it is said)
SUBORDINATER subordinating conjunction (when)
SUBJECT noun phrase (it)
PREDICATER verb phrase (is said)
Before moving on to the fourth and final level of linguistic structure, discourse structure, let us focus a bit more on the distinction between functional and formal labels in syntax. If we remove the word A from the noun phrase a word in 1.6 and replace it with the, the functional label DETERMINER would remain unchanged, but the formal label of the part of speech would change from indefinite article to definite article. Other parts of speech that can occupy the DETERMINER position in a noun phrase are demonstrative articles (this, that, these, those) and possessive articles (my, your, his, her, its, our, their) -- both clearly different formal categories but both able to occupy the same functional position in a noun phrase that indefinite and definite articles can occupy.
The same distinction between function and form is applicable at the phrase level. If I replace the word dead in A word is dead when it is said with a corpse, the SUBJECT COMPLEMENT label of dead would remain, but this position would now be occupied by a noun phrase instead of an adjective phrase. And, whereas the adjective phrase dead has only the adjective dead occupying the HEAD position within it, the SUBJECT COMPLEMENT noun phrase a corpse has a DETERMINER indefinite article, a, and a HEAD noun, corpse. Please take some time to study the analytical displays presented in this section, carefully noting just what the various functional and formal labels are saying about the words they label.
We saw in earlier sections that you, and all speakers of English, know the categories of English sounds and their patterns in English syllables (phonology). You also know a large inventory of English morphemes and their patterns in English words (morphology). In this section we have seen that you intuitively know the part of speech of each English word in your vocabulary and you know how parts of speech pattern into phrases and clauses (syntax). But there is one more dimension to language structure that we should look at briefly in order to complete this overview of the structure of English, and that is discourse structure.
IV. DISCOURSE STRUCTURE
Suppose I had presented the two sentences in the poem by Emily Dickinson in the following order and asked you the question, Is this English?
1.8
I say it just begins to live that day.
A word is dead when it is said, some say.
You probably would have answered Yes, if Yes and No were your only choices. But there is a sense in which these same two sentences as the ones in the poem are less “English” when their order is switched as in 1.8. Something is odd, or confusing about them. What is it? What does the pronoun it refer to? What is the day referred to in the phrase that day? Even when you read the second sentence, you are still not sure of the answers to these questions. For the two sentences to make complete sense, they have to occur in the order they had in the poem.
It thus seems that another part of what you know about English is how to fit sentences together meaningfully into larger discourse units, typically conversations in spoken language and paragraphs in written language. That is, we need to classify sentences into certain categories and then try to describe the positions of each type of sentence in discourse patterns.
| Outline structure of English | ||
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(collected from Internet and revised by me)
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