A Modern Course in English Syntax

Liliane Haegeman, Herman Wekker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134958610
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This popular course book gives students of English and linguistics a systematic account of the rules of English syntax, and acquaints them with the general methodology of syntactic description. It teaches them how to formulate syntactic arguments, and how to apply the tests in the analysis of sentences.

1

AIMS AND METHODS

1.1 WHAT IS SYNTAX?

Syntax, or syntactic analysis, may be defined as:

(a)	determining the relevant component parts of a sentence
(b)	describing these parts grammatically.

The component parts of a sentence are called constituents. In other words, syntax involves the two closely related tasks of:

(a)	breaking down the sentence into its constituents
(b)	assigning some grammatical label to each constituent, stating what type of constituent (or grammatical category) it is, and what grammatical function it has.

This definition of syntax implies that we start from what is regarded as the largest unit of syntactic description—the sentence—and proceed until we arrive at the smallest meaningful unit. This is called a ‘top to bottom’ analysis. The units smaller than the sentence will be referred to as clauses, phrases, words and morphemes respectively. However, instead of saying that a sentence can be broken down into smaller and smaller constituents, we might also look at the sentence the other way round—that is, ‘from bottom to top’—and say that constituents at different levels can combine to form increasingly larger units: we proceed then from the morpheme to the sentence as a whole. Constituents are like building blocks which pattern in certain ways to form larger and larger units, the largest unit being the sentence. Each constituent (except the smallest) can be broken down into its component parts. The purpose of doing syntax is to discover the ways in which constituents combine to form the structure of sentences.

In this book we adopt the (traditional) hierarchy of sentence constituents, as shown in the following diagram:

SENTENCE↔CLAUSE↔PHRASEWORD↔MORPHEME

This diagram represents the hierarchical scale of constituents. The four double-pointed arrows in the diagram indicate that it may be read ‘from left to right’, or ‘from right to left.’

The arrows pointing to the right indicate that a sentence may consist of one or more than one clause, that a clause may consist of one or more than one phrase, that a phrase may consist of one or more than one word, and that a word may consist of one or more than one morpheme. Morphemes are the minimal, indivisible units in syntax.

Conversely, as indicated by the arrows pointing to the left, we might also say that one or more than one morpheme may constitute a word, one or more than one word may form a phrase, one or more than one phrase may form a clause, and one or more than one clause may form a sentence.

In what follows we shall also see that a clause may contain one or more constituent clauses, and that a phrase may contain one or more constituent phrases or clauses.

To illustrate the hierarchical structure of sentences, let us consider sentence (1):

(1)	The snake killed the rat and swallowed it.

This sentence consists of two coordinate clauses, joined together by the coordinator and. The first clause is: The snake killed the rat, and the second is: swallowed it. The second clause has a reduced form. Its complete form would be it swallowed it.

The first clause in (1) consists of two phrases, and the second, as it stands, consists of only one phrase. The two phrases in the first clause are The snake and killed the rat, and the phrase in the second clause is swallowed it. As we shall see later, the snake is a noun phrase and killed the rat and swallowed it are both verb phrases.

Each phrase is made up of words. The snake consists of two words: the and snake; killed the rat consists of three words, of which the last two (the +rat) again constitute a noun phrase; and swallowed it consists of two words, of which the second in itself constitutes a noun phrase. The constituents the rat and it are examples of (noun) phrases within (verb) phrases.

Sentence (1) contains eight words, including the coordinator and. Each word consists of one or two morphemes: the, snake, rat, and and it are one-morpheme words, whereas killed and swallowed are both two-morpheme words. The, snake, rat, etc. are full words and morphemes at the same time: the word and morpheme boundaries coincide. The two morphemes of killed and swallowed are kill and—ed, and swallow and—ed (see 1.2.2).

1.2 REPRESENTING SENTENCE STRUCTURE

1.2.1 BRACKETING

The syntactic structure of sentence (1) above may be represented provisionally by marking off each constituent from sentence level to word level by square brackets: [ ]. To simplify matters, we shall ignore the morpheme boundaries here. This convention of bracketing yields the following analysis, which looks rather daunting at first sight:

(2)	[[[[The] [snake]] [[killed] [[the] [rat]]]] [and] [[[swallowed] [[it]]]]]

Analysis (2) is the result of first bracketing the sentence, then the two clauses, then the phrases, and finally the words, as follows:

Sentence:

(3a)	[The snake killed the rat and swallowed it]

Clauses:

(3b)	[[The snake killed the rat] and [swallowed it]]

Phrases:

(3c)	[[[The snake] [killed [the rat]]] and [[swallowed [it]]]]

Words:

(3d)	[[[[The] [snake]] [[killed] [[the] [rat]]]] [and] [[[swallowed] [[it]]]]]

Analysis (3d) is of course identical with (2) above.

The bracketing has here been done on a purely intuitive basis. In the following chapters we shall deal with the formal arguments which justify those choices. Check through the above analysis carefully again, and try to bracket the following sentences from sentence level to word level in the same way:

(4)	The terrorists assassinated the ambassador.
(5)	Her husband is an aristocrat.
(6)	He gave his mother a present.

In (2) above we can see that word and morpheme boundaries may coincide: the, snake, rat, etc. are all one word and one morpheme, as opposed to killed and swallowed, which are words consisting of two morphemes each. Words and phrases may also coincide, as in:

(7)	John laughed.

In this sentence John is both a phrase (a noun phrase) and a word (a noun); laughed is also both a phrase (a verb phrase) and a word (a verb). The units sentence and clause also coincide in (7). Bracketing from sentence level to word level yields (8):

(8)	[[[[John]] [[laughed]]]]

Word, phrase, claus...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1: Aims and Methods
• 2: Constituents
• 3: Functions
• 4: Processes
• 5: Non-finite Clauses: Raising and Control
• 6: Reanalysis: a Problem of Bracketing
• 7: Levels of Structure
• Index