English Grammar

Richard Hudson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134687718
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

English Grammar:

* helps users to understand grammatical concepts

* encourages the reader to practise applying newly discovered concepts to everyday texts

* teaches students to analyze almost every word in any English text

* provides teachers and students with a firm grounding in a system which they can both understand and apply.

1
WORD-CLASSES: NOUNS AND VERBS

The first point to establish is that you already know English grammar. Let’s consider some evidence. Please answer the following questions.

EXERCISE
Data questions

1.1

1. Which of the following sentences is ordinary English?

(a) Lightning flashed.

(b) Flashed lightning.

2. Which of the following words may fill the gap below without any other word being added?: like, liking, know, knowledge \

People __ grammar.

Discussion

I predict that you rejected out of hand one of the sentences in question 1, and two of the words in question 2. If so, you must know English grammar, at least in the sense in which I am using the term. Remember, for me everyone who can speak English knows English grammar, even if they don’t know a verb from a vowel.

If my prediction was wrong, then you must have misunderstood my questions. That may prove that I’m not communicating very well—one of the themes of this book is that communication is really rather difficult, and miscommunication all too easy. It certainly does not prove that you don’t know any English grammar, less still that you’re stupid. Questions like 1 and 2 are actually very odd, and you might even call them a perversion of ordinary language—language turned in on itself, so to speak. For most people language is primarily a tool for higher ends—entertaining, informing, persuading, and so on; the tool works so well and so efficiently that we take it for granted just as we do our other advanced skills like walking, opening doors or tying knots.

Rather surprisingly, perhaps, some people can stand ‘outside’ their language, as it were, and contemplate it, and for them English grammar may be easy. They are the lucky ones. Their ability isn’t a sign of superior intelligence, but of a rather specialised intelligence (like the ability to do crossword puzzles); but it can be learned. So if at first you find my questions about words and sentences unnatural and pointless, please persist and I promise your efforts will be rewarded. You will start to find this perversion a little easier, and perhaps even enjoyable; and the activity will, I hope, help you to understand language and to use it better. Language is by far the most important tool that humans have ever developed, and as with all our other tools, the better we understand it, the better we can apply it.

The activities in this unit are an opportunity to explore the answers you gave, and to work through some of their consequences. Once you have understood those things, you will be well into the study of English grammar.

Before we go on I should tell you the answers that I expected.

1. Accepted: Lightning flashed.

Rejected: *Flashed lightning.

2. Accepted: People like/know grammar.

Rejected: *People liking/knowledge grammar.

I have marked the rejected sentences with *, a standard signal for ‘bad English’, or in more technical terms, ‘ungrammatical’.

EXERCISE
Nouns and verbs

1.2

3. The main challenge is to explain why the good sentences are good and the bad, bad. First, can the difference be explained in terms of the meanings of the words? Here is a list of all the words in questions 1–2.

flashed, know, knowledge, lightning, like, liking, people

Classify the meanings of these words using the following list of terms (which are meant to be as helpful as possible); for example, a ‘person-word’ is a word that means a person:

person-words

thing-words

state-words

event-words

Use this classification to explain the differences between the good and bad sentences. You should aim at an explanation like this: ‘If a sentence contains a__-word and a__-word, the__-word must come before the__- word.’

So what? Can we explain our data in terms of meanings alone?

4. Now try an explanation in terms of the words themselves, i.e. in terms of what kinds of word they are.

Classify the words themselves as either nouns or verbs. (In my experience everyone is pretty good at doing this even if they don’t know anything else about grammar; but just in case you’re not too sure, remember that hate is a verb but hatred is a noun, whereas love may be either.)

nouns: _____________________________________________

verbs: ______________________________________________

Now use this classification to explain the difference between the two examples in question 1. This time your explanation should be like this: ‘If a sentence consists of a__and a__, the__must come before the__.’

The examples in question 2 need a different treatment. We started with a ‘frame’ of words, ‘People__grammar.’ Your task is to explain why some words can fill the slot in this frame, and others cannot, so your explanation must be like this: ‘If a three-word sentence starts with a__and finishes with a__, the word between them must be a__.’ So what?

As you can imagine, these explanations are not the last word in English grammar; in fact, no self-respecting grammarian would dream of offering anything like them, and we shall very soon have moved beyond such things ourselves. Nevertheless, we have already established a very important and fundamental principle: that at least some facts in grammar are facts about words themselves, rather than about their meanings. We cannot explain the difference between like and liking in ‘People like/ *liking grammar’ by talking about their meanings, because they have the same meaning. (If you don’t believe me, try to work out precisely what the difference is!) That was the point of getting you to classify all the words as ‘state-words’, and so on. But this similarity of meaning does not stop them from belonging to different WORD-CLASSES, which is what ‘verb’ and ‘noun’ are. Word-classes are one of the basic components of grammar, as we shall see, but the main point that we have to establish from the start is that they cannot be side-stepped by talking about semantic categories like ‘person-word’ and ‘state-word’. This isn’t just a matter of tradition, or of belief; it is a matter of fact. It may be, of course, that someone really clever can answer my challenge by proving that like and liking have different meanings (some theoretical linguists actually believe they can do this already), but until this answer comes we must stick to word-classes. In doing so we shall be following all the grammarians since the Ancient Greeks, who first discovered word-classes.

Separating grammar and meaning may sound back-to-front, given the obvious fact that we use grammar in order to express meanings. In fact, one of the most general points that will emerge from this course is that grammatical structure is very closely related to meaning, and I shall push you hard to use meaning as a guide. Why, then, can’t we explain everything in grammar in terms of meaning? The easy answer is that language just isn’t like that; but then you can ask why not, and the discussion gets really interesting.

Unfortunately that will have to wait for another book. For this course, just remember that grammar and meaning are closely linked, but different. Here is another exercise to reinforce the point:

EXERCISE
Grammar and meaning

1.3

5. All the following sentences are bad in some way, but they are bad for different reasons. Explain what is wrong in each one.

(a) The earth is flat. Bad because_______________

(b) Red things are colourless.__________________________

(c) Him likes ice cream._______________________________

(d) Ice cream likes he.________________________________

Decide which of these explanations amounts to a verdict of ‘ungrammatical’, and put an asterisk (*) against the sentences concerned. If you want a symbol to show you disapprove of the sentences that you had to accept as grammatical, you can use ‘!’.

Let’s get back to our main business: the two main word-classes of English grammar (and, indeed, of the grammar of every other language that has been studied): noun and verb. Here’s an exercise to boost your confidence.

EXERCISE
Classification

1.4

6. Pick out the nouns and verbs in the following sentences by writing N ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• USING THIS BOOK
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• OVERVIEW
• 1. WORD-CLASSES: NOUNS AND VERBS
• 2. NOUN EXPANSIONS: HEADS, DEPENDENTS AND ADJECTIVES
• 3. LINKING WORDS: PREPOSITIONS AND COORDINATORS
• 4. SUBCLASSIFICATION: PRONOUNS, DETERMINERS AND OTHER NOUNS
• 5. VERB EXPANSIONS: SUBJECTS, OBJECTS, ‘SHARERS’ AND ADVERBS
• 6. VERB CHAINS: AUXILIARY AND FULL VERBS AND FINITENESS
• 7. FANCY VERB CHAINS: TO, THAT, NOT AND CLAUSES
• 8. SUBORDINATE CLAUSE CLUES: WH-PRONOUNS, PREPOSITIONS AND NON-FINITE VERBS (AGAIN)
• 9. SUBORDINATE CLAUSE USES
• 10. SENTENCES AND INFORMATION: IT, THERE, APPOSITION AND PUNCTUATION
• APPENDIX I: MODEL ANALYSIS OF A 100-WORD TEXT
• APPENDIX II: APPROACHES TO GRAMMAR
• MODEL ANSWERS
• REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING