The Structure of English Clauses

David Young, David J. Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138919082
• eBook ISBN: 9781317419839
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

First published in 1980, this book provides a clear and practical introduction to a wide variety of English structures. It concentrates on a large and crucial area of English grammar, which covers units of higher rank than words, and structures that have verbs rather than nouns as their nuclear elements.

Throughout the book, David Young focuses on the English language as it is actually spoken. At every point his discussion of syntax is closely integrated with meaning, and he pays particular attention to the ways in which speakers of English signal their intensions. The author points out how verbal patterning is meaningful, and outlines the criteria used by grammarians to distinguish one structure from another. The result is an analytical framework that can be applied to any real-life text in order to understand its structure.

This is a book that will encourage a realistic, exploratory and investigative attitude towards the English language.

1 Levels of linguistic structure

1.1 Structure

The aim of this book is to show the reader how to find and describe certain kinds of pattern that occur in English text. ‘Text’ means any piece of language, long or short, spoken or written, complete or fragmentary. Text is language in action, which means that people are using language for some purpose in some real situation in which normally there are other people to communicate with.

Such verbal behaviour is obviously patterned, or structured; otherwise it would be unintelligible, random and purposeless. Text can be seen as the realization of a selection of patterns from a vast potential. It is meaningful only because the patterns it displays might have been other patterns but are not.

It is important to appreciate that pattern, or structure, in language behaviour is dependent on this contrast between what is actualized at some point in time and space and what is actualizable.

1.2 Levels of language

There are so many kinds of pattern in text that it is necessary to separate them into distinct levels of structure. The elements of the patterns on one level are of a different kind from those on the other levels. Of course, this division into various levels is a purely analytic procedure; language is a unity and its patterns of different types are simultaneous and interrelated. It is comparatively easy to study patterns on one level or another, but much more difficult to put all the levels together again and still be aware of how the whole system works. It is customary to think in terms of levels (or strata) ranging from low to high. The use of these terms is a figure of speech, but it seems to be helpful to think of the level of sound structure as low level patterning and of the level of discourse structure, in which people are acting towards each other within various types of social setting, as high level.

Between the low and the high comes the level of grammatical structure, part of which is the subject of this book. In order to see the grammatical level in its proper place, I shall spend a little time in this chapter describing the other levels: phonology, the level of patterned sound, and discourse, the level of patterned linguistic action.

1.3 Phonology

Phonology is the level of patterned sound, not simply the level of sound. Speech sound, considered as pure noise, does not belong to any particular language. In order to understand speech sound as belonging to one language or another, we must know how the language in question makes use of sound; that is, we must know what differences in sound are significant in the structure of that language. For instance, the difference between the initial consonants in day and they ([d] and [ð]) is distinctive in English, but not in French or Spanish. Conversely, there are two kinds of [l] sound in English, occurring in limb and mill, but native English speakers are not usually aware that there is a difference because it is not a distinctive difference; from the point of view of English sound pattern these two different sounds count as the same.

Even at this low level of language, therefore, we are already dealing not with physical, concrete sounds but with abstract units in a system of contrasts – not with sounds as such, but with patterns that are manifested in sound. The basic units in phonological patterns are known as phonemes.

It is a characteristic of language that at each level the basic units can combine with each other to form larger units. Phonemes combine to form syllables. For instance, principles has nine phonemes – one for each of the symbols in the phonological transcription / prɪnsɪplz /. But the phonological structure is not to be thought of as a simple row of nine units. The nine can be grouped into three syllabic units: / prɪn sɪ plz /. Each syllable has a structure. Typically, the English syllable has a vowel phoneme as its nucleus; this may be preceded and/or followed by a consonant phoneme or a cluster of consonants. The last syllable in principles is of a different type; its nucleus is not a vowel phoneme but one of a small number of consonants that are able to function as a nucleus, namely / l /.

Even this brief description shows that syllables are patterned combinations of phonemes; that is, that syllables have structure. The types of syllable structure that occur in English can be described, and we can state that certain hypothetical patterns, like / pfun /, are un-English, not because there happens to be no such word in the language, but because there is no such syllabic structure. Compare this with / kus /, koose, which happens not to be an English word, but which, as far as phonological pattern goes, could very well be one.

Larger than the syllable is the rhythmical unit, or foot. The foot is constituted of syllables. For instance principles and problems of religion consists of three feet, as shown in the transcription in 1, where the symbol / marks foot boundaries:

1	/ prɪn sɪ pl zən / prɒb ləm zəv rɪ / lɪdʒ ən /

The structure of the foot can be described in terms of three factors. First, the number of syllables it contains; second, the various degrees of prominence, or salience, of the syllables; third, the relative length of time which the foot and its constituent syllables occupy. In the analysis of English rhythm on which the above transcription is based, each foot begins with a salient syllable.

Feet combine to form tone groups, which have a structure describable in terms of intonation, i.e. the fluctuations in the pitch of the voice and the place in the intonation contour where the most significant change in direction of pitch occurs. This place is called the tonic. For example, the most usual way of pronouncing How do you do? Pleased to meet you, has two tone groups with the boundary coming before pleased. The first tone group has the tonic on the last syllable and the second has it on the last but one. Tonics are underlined in 2:

2	// how do you / do // pleased to / meet you //

The symbol // represents the boundaries of a tone group. (The rhythm and intonation can be represented satisfactorily without showing the precise syllable and phoneme structure; hence the above example is given in conventional orthography.) Both of these groups have the falling tone, Tone 1, on their tonics. That is to say, the pitch of the voice falls from a high or mid level to a low level on this syllable. Tone 1 can be contrasted with Tone 2, rising tone, which is the typical intonation in 3:

3	// is there any / sugar in it //

In this book reference is fairly often made to the rhythm and intonation of grammatical structures. For this reason Appendix A gives a rather brief account of one analysis of English rhythm and intonation. (See Halliday 1970a.) The subject is a large one, and the appendix is not a substitute for a proper study of this part of English phonology. It is included so that the book will be a little more self-contained than it would otherwise be, and so that the reader will understand the notation employed.

1.4 Discourse

The distinction between discourse and grammar can be introduced with a simple example. Imagine that somebody utters Where have you put your shoes? Considered grammatically this is an interrogative clause. Moreover it is a kind of interrogative that begins with what is known as a WH-item such as where? who? when? at what time? which car? how long? etc. This is different from the other kind of interrogative that is often called the ‘yes/no’ type, such as Have you put your shoes away? The grammatical structures and their meanings will be discussed in detail in Chapter 5.

In the description of discourse we must take account not only of the grammatical form of the utterance but also of the social setting in which it is made, including the relationship between speaker and addressee. If the speaker is someone who is known to be about to clean everyone’s shoes, the utterance of our example clause is to be interpreted as a request for information to assist the accomplishment of the task in hand. On the other hand, if the speaker is a parent addressing a child who has left his shoes in the middle of the kitchen floor, the utterance cannot be taken as a request for information. It is something more like a command combined with a rebuke. Grammatically the utterances are the same in each of the two cases we have considered, but from the point of view of discourse structure they are very different. In order to interpret the speaker’s meaning at this level the addressee has to apply his knowledge not only of the grammatical system but of the social setting. If we use the terms question, statement and command for types of move which speakers make towards addressees in well-defined social settings, these terms belong to discourse analysis, not to grammar, where the appropriate terms are interrogative, declarative and imper...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of symbols
• 1 Levels of linguistic structure
• 2 Grammar and grammatical rules
• 3 Clauses: meanings and structures
• 4 Structural recursion
• 5 Mood
• 6 Mood tags
• 7 Imperatives
• 8 Modality
• 9 Adjuncts and prepositional groups
• 10 Complementation
• 11 Phase
• 12 Theme
• 13 Voice
• 14 The verbal group 1
• 15 The verbal group 2
• 16 Tense and aspect
• 17 Clause complexes 1
• 18 Clause complexes 2
• 19 Bound clauses 1
• 20 Bound clauses 2
• 21 Reporting clauses
• 22 Reported mood and reported speech
• 23 Rankshift
• Appendix A: English intonation
• Appendix B: Passages of spoken text
• Notes and suggestions for further reading
• References
• Key to exercises
• Index