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PHRASES 1
A single written sentence may stand for two different sentence structures, each having a different meaning. The structures differ because the words are grouped into different phrases. Phrases can be discovered by replacement and movement of sequences of words.
What you already know about a sentence is that it is a sequence of words, starting with a capital letter, and ending with a full stop. When you have come to the end of this book, you will have a very different understanding of what a sentence is, and what it is made of. This understanding was traditionally called an understanding of grammar. In linguistic theory it is the understanding of SYNTAX SYNTAX, which is the structure of the sentence. It will require some work to achieve this understanding; here are the reasons which I think make it worth the trouble.
• The ability to speak or write by constructing the complex objects which are sentences is something that only humans can do. Other animals can communicate, but sentence structure is beyond them. By studying sentences we study ourselves. Whereas grammar was once a matter of learning by rote, now – and in this book – it is a science, based on experiment and exploration.
• All humans have language, but we are divided by our languages and our dialects. One of the goals of this book is to understand how languages and dialects differ, with the broader goal of understanding how, fundamentally, they are the same. The knowledge of language which linguists have tends to make them more tolerant of linguistic diversity; this can only be a good thing.
• Linguistics – the study of language – is applied in many domains, including medical, social, legal, literary, anthropological, and historical studies. The understanding of how sentences work is the first step towards being able to participate in these applications of language.
Meaning and Phrase Structure
The sentence in (1) has two different meanings: it is ambiguous.
(1) I was reading the letter to John.
▶ Before you read any further, decide what the two alternative meanings of this sentence are.
This sentence might mean:
(2) There was a letter addressed to John which I was reading (perhaps to myself).
Or it might mean:
(3) There was a letter (to me, perhaps) which I was reading aloud to John.
How does one sequence of words produce two different and alternative meanings? The answer is that the sequencing of words does not by itself produce a meaning; instead there is a hidden organization of the words which gives them their meaning. For the sequence of words in (1) there are two alternative organizations of the words, each of which delivers a different meaning: because the ambiguity is based on two different structures for the same sequence of words this is called a !STRUCTURAL AMBIGUITY Structural ambiguity. As people who understand English, we know the two alternative organizations implicitly because we are able to understand the two meanings, and this means that we are unconsciously organizing the words either one way or another. The organization of a sentence is its SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE Syntactic structure, and in this book you will learn how to draw a diagram of the syntactic structure of a sentence which you unconsciously already know – as a central part of your ability to speak and write.
The words in (1) are visibly laid out on the page like beads on a string. To understand how this string of words can produce two different meanings we must say that they are invisibly organized into groups. We might think of the words as put into boxes, all contained within the sentence which is the biggest box of all.
A ‘box’ of words is called a PHRASE Phrase. In (4) the sequence of words the letter to John forms a single phrase, while in (5) the sequence is broken up into two phrases: the letter forms one phrase and to John forms another separate one. This explains why a sentence can have two different meanings, because the same string of words can be grouped in two different ways, and each grouping relates to a meaning.
It is often useful to think about the relation between a phrase and something in the world which it represents. In the case of (4) the grouping the letter to John names a specific object, a letter whose characteristic is that it is (addressed) to John. In the case of (5) the object represented is just the letter and the words to John do not help to identify that object.
Replacement and Phrase Structure
A sentence has a syntactic structure which is hidden from view but which can be revealed by various tests. In this section you will learn a simple test (6) which will reveal some of the phrases in the sentence.
(6) TEST: REPLACEMENT BY IT
If a sequence of words can be replaced by the word it without significantly changing the meaning, then that sequence of words is a phrase.
If the test is applied to the sentence in (1), we see that there are two alternatives – either the sequence the letter to John is replaced by it and hence is a phrase, or the sequence the letter is replaced by it and hence is a phrase. The two alternative possibilities of replacement give two sentences with different groupings into phrases (7) and (8), and which each have a single clear meaning.
Phrase (7) means (2) (the letter is addressed to John)
(8) I was reading it to John.
Phrase (8) means (3) (implying that John hears it being read)
The relation between these and the boxed versions of the sentences is clear. In (7), it replaces the boxed sequence in (4), and this organization of the sentence corresponds to the meaning whereby the letter to John describes an object, a letter addressed to John. And in (8), it replaces the boxed sequence the letter in (5), with the other meaning.
Replacement is possible because the word it is the same kind of thing as the sequence of words [the letter to John] or the sequence of words [the letter]. All three are a specific kind of phrase called a noun phrase.
In box terms, there is a box labelled ‘noun phrase’ which can contain it or the letter to John or the letter. So we are replacing like for like, with the word it being a minimal or stripped-down noun phrase standing for a more filled-out noun phrase. It is called a PRONOUN Pronoun, though it should more properly be called a pro-noun-phrase because it substitutes for a noun phrase. Other pronouns can also substitute for noun phrases – some of the pronouns of English are listed below.
Some pronouns:
it, she, her, hers, he, him, his, they, them, their, theirs, I, my, mine, you, your, yours, we, our, ours.
▶ The pronoun him can also substitute for part of the sentence in (1). Which part can it substitute for, and what does that tell us about that part of the sentence?
Movement and Phrase Structure
Words stick together when they are in the same phrase – they can be picked up and moved together. Again, a phrase is like a box of words within the sentence, which can be picked up and carried somewhere else. We can formulate another test (9) for constituency.
(9) THE MOVEMENT TEST
If a sequence of words can be move...
