English Syntax and Argumentation

Bas Aarts

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781137605795
• eBook ISBN: 9781350308039
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Grammar & Punctuation
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This textbook on English syntax aims to give students a thorough grounding in the basics of sentence structure, and at the same time strives to acquaint them with the essentials of syntactic argument. The text is written in a user-friendly style with many 'hands-on' in-text and chapter-final exercises. At the end of each chapter there is a section with suggested further reading material, and there is a bibliography and list of recommended reference works at the end of the book.

Part I

Function and Form

Introduction

1

Along with sleeping, eating and drinking, talking is one of the most common of human activities. Hardly a day goes by when we don’t talk, if only to ourselves! When we speak, we utter a stream of sounds with a certain meaning, which our interlocutors can process and understand, provided, of course, they speak the same language. Naturally, language also exists in written form. It then consists of a string of letters which form words, which in turn make up sentences. Why is the study of language worthwhile? Well, first and foremost, the capacity for using language is uniquely human, and if we know how language works we get to know something about ourselves. Other animals also communicate with each other, to be sure, but their communicative and expressive powers are very limited. Thus, while dogs and cats can signal pleasure by wagging their tails or purring, there’s no way for them to tell you something more complicated; for example, that although they are generally happy, they wouldn’t mind if you turned the heating up a little. By contrast, we humans can communicate just about any meaning we wish, however complex, using language. As an example, consider the utterance Had Nick been here on time, we would not have missed the train. This is a perfectly straightforward and easily intelligible sentence, although to understand it we have to do a bit of mental computing by creating in our minds a ‘picture’ of a situation that did not obtain, a situation in which Nick was on time, and we did not miss our train. Or, consider the sentence I went to a conference on language in France. Have you noticed that it’s ambiguous? Under one reading I went to a conference on language which took place in France; under the second reading I went to a conference which was about ‘language in France’, which could have taken place anywhere. This is called a structural ambiguity, because we can group the words together differently to bring out the two meanings. There are, of course, many other reasons to be fascinated by language. If you’re a student of literature, you cannot really grasp the totality of meaning that a work of literary art communicates without knowing how language works. And if you’re interested in interpersonal relationships, you might wonder why there are so many ways to ask someone to open the window: ‘Open the window!’, ‘Can you open the window (please)?’, ‘Could you open the window (please)?’, ‘I was wondering whether you could possibly open the window?’ and ‘I’m hot’. The last example is especially interesting, because at first sight it’s a simple statement about one’s physical condition. For the hearer to get to the meaning ‘open the window, please’, some mental computation is again involved. I could give endless examples to illustrate the many fascinating aspects of the field of language studies, called linguistics.

In this book we focus on the structure of English. Now, if you have thought about language, you will have realised that whether it is spoken or written, it is not a hotchpotch of randomly distributed elements. Instead, the linguistic ingredients that language is made up of are arranged in accordance with a set of rules. This set of rules we call the grammar of a language. Grammar is a vast domain of inquiry and it will be necessary to limit ourselves to a subdo-main. In this book we will only be concerned with the part of grammar that concerns itself with the structure of sentences. This is called syntax.

How can we go about describing the structure of sentences? Well, before we can even start, we will need to specify what we mean by ‘sentence’. This is not as straightforward as it may seem, and linguists have come up with a variety of definitions. In this book we will say that a sentence is a string of words that begins in a capital letter and ends in a full stop, and is typically used to express a state of affairs in the world. This definition is not unproblematic, but will suffice for present purposes.

Let’s now see what kinds of issues syntax deals with. First of all, one of the principal concerns of syntax is the order of the units that make up sentences. In English we cannot string words into a sentence randomly. For example, we can have (1), but not (2) or (3):

(1)The president ate a doughnut.

(2)*The president a doughnut ate.

(3)*Doughnut president the ate a.

NB: An asterisk (*) placed before a sentence indicates that it is not a possible structure in English.

The contrast between (1) and (2) shows that in English the word that denotes the activity of eating (ate) must precede the unit that refers to the entity that was being eaten (a doughnut). Furthermore, if we compare (2) and (3) we see that not only must ate precede a doughnut, but we must also ensure that the two elements the and a precede president and doughnut, respectively. It seems that the and president together form a unit, in the same way that a and doughnut do. Our syntactic framework will have to be able to explain why it is that words group themselves together. We will use the term constituent for strings of one or more words that syntactically and semantically (i.e. meaning-wise) behave as units.

Next, consider sentence (4):

(4)The cat devoured the rat.

It is possible to rearrange the words in this sentence as follows:

(5)The rat devoured the cat.

Notice that this is still a good sentence in English, but its meaning is different from (4), despite the fact that both sentences contain exactl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Editor Title
• Contents
• Preface to the First Edition
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the Third Edition
• Preface to the Fourth Edition
• Preface to the Fifth Edition
• Part I Function and Form
• Part II Elaboration
• Part III Argumentation
• Part IV Application
• Glossary
• Reference Works: Dictionaries, Encyclopedias, Grammars and Other Publications on the English Language
• Bibliography
• Answer Key for the Exercises
• Index