English Syntax in Three Dimensions

History – Synchrony – Diachrony

Carola Trips

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9783110395143
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book deals with syntax in three dimensions: in part I with the history of grammatical theory, in part II with synchronic aspects of Present-Day English, and in part III with diachronic aspects of English. The most prominent linguistic terms and phenomena are discussed in their historical context and are taken up again in the synchronic and diachronic parts. In this way they can be viewed from different perspectives.

At the end of each chapter a summary and recommendations for further reading is provided as well as exercises in parts II and III. There is also a webpage for this book with more material, a glossary, and model answers of the exercises. The aims of the book are 1) to provide an introduction to the history of grammatical theory in order to show how and why generative grammar evolved (alongside other theories); in this way, generative grammar is presented in its historical context, and the motivation for the ideas and assumptions of this theory becomes clear; 2) to show that the terms and phenomena discussed are still applicable and interesting today; 3) to investigate phenomena of Present-Day English and their development in the history of English by means of authentic data, and to find explanations for the developmental paths they took by applying theory.

This book primarily aims at undergraduate students of English or linguistics who have already acquired some knowledge of syntax and generative syntactic theory. It is also well suited for students specialising in syntax, syntactic theory, and language change. It can further be used as a study aid for final exams.

Part I: The history of grammar

dp n="16" folio="" ? dp n="17" folio="" ?

1 Introduction

This part of the book aims at providing students of linguistics with the background of the history of grammatical theory needed to understand the terminology and models of contemporary linguistics, or more precisely, grammar. These insights into former ideas about language help show things from different points of view and raise the reader’s consciousness of the fact that the many ideas and models around all justify their existence, and that one’s one-sidedness should be replaced by objectiveness which is essential to do science properly. This aim is pursued not only in this part of the book but also in the combination of parts one to three: only by taking a look at grammar from different perspectives—the history of grammar, synchronic and diachronic phenomena—do we get the broad perspective we need to fully understand what grammar really is.

Students of linguistics or a philology like English or German are generally introduced to the topic in their first year of study. Regardless of the definition of linguistics adopted in these classes (and textbooks used), language description, of course, always plays a prominent role. In the best case scenario, students come with some background knowledge of grammar from school and are able to apply grammatical terminology to language in an adequate way. So they will talk about nouns, verbs, adjectives, subjects and objects in a text. What most of them are not aware of is that by doing so they use terms and ideas from times when linguistics as a scientific discipline did not exist. Thus, there must have been times when people felt the need to deal with language but they had other reasons or aims to do so. Why should we, for example, divide a sentence into a subject and a predicate? What is the motivation behind it? The answer to these and similar questions can only be gained if we delve into the history of grammatical theory, which we will shortly do. It is an intriguing enterprise with ‘wow’ effects guaranteed!

Before we do so, however, we should at least briefly deal with the terms grammar and grammatical theory. Try to think of the meaning(s) that come to your mind without looking up the terms in a dictionary of linguistics. Most of you probably think of grammar as a formal system of a language’s rules which may have the shape of a book. Quirk and Greenbaum’s A comprehensive Grammar of the English Language would be one example. In a grammar book we find the systematic description of the rules of a (natural) language, and depending on the aim a grammarian pursues, the method can be either descriptive or prescriptive. The term descriptive refers to objectively elucidating observed properties of a language, whereas the term prescriptive refers to teaching ‘proper’, i.e. standardised, language. We will see that in the course of time the nature of grammars changed from being prescriptive to becoming descriptive. If you have heard of Noam Chomsky’s ideas you might define grammar as the speaker’s knowledge of his/her language which implies that grammar is a rather abstract notion, an internalised system in the brain of human beings. Here grammar is seen as a language theory representing the competence of a native speaker. To get to an understanding of this system, its abstract structure and form of organisation must be described and analysed.

The term grammar as such is very old and derives from Old Greek grámma(ta) which at that time referred to ‘letter(s) of the alphabet or script’, whereas tekhnē grammatiké referred to ‘the study of the letter of the alphabet’ in a very general sense. Since grammar was tightly linked to rhetoric, it comprised aspects of style as well as the interpretation of literary texts. Therefore, the term grammar had its broadest meaning in Classical Antiquity: it referred to the entirety of language, stylistics and rhetoric. During the Late Antiquity and the European Middle Ages the denotation of the term was narrowed and grammar was defined as a system of rules (compendium). It then acquired the status of only one part of the three verbal arts (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic), influenced by logic.

With the rise of linguistics as a scientific discipline in its own right in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, grammar became one branch of this field. Grammatical theory subsumes many different ways of dealing with grammar, depending on the aims and purposes that its proponents think it should serve, and on the theoretical background and opinions they have about the workings of language. We have already come across the difference between prescriptive and descriptive grammars, but a further difference which will feature here prominently is the difference between synchronic and diachronic grammars. As we will see, this dichotomy, postulated by Ferdinand de Saussure, refers to two different ways to deal with language. Synchrony refers to the state of language existing at one point in time, whereas diachrony refers to the development of language throughout time. As already mentioned in the introduction of the book, in part II we will deal with grammar from a synchronic point of view, i.e. investigate the grammar of Present-Day English, and in part III of the book we will investigate the development of the most prominent grammatical features of English in the course of time.

Coming back to the term grammar, depending on the types of contemporary theories, we can make a distinction between dependency grammar, valency grammar, functional grammar, and Generative Grammar, just to name some of them. We will come back to these types of grammars or grammatical theories in the following sections.

Looking at the title of the book you might wonder why we have been talking about the term grammar without referring to the term syntax. After all the title of this textbook is Syntax in three dimensions. So we need to clarify that on the one hand, these terms are tightly linked, but on the other hand, they are used to refer to different aspects of language, As mentioned above, grammar refers to the study of the morphological and syntactic regularities of a language. In this traditional sense grammar deals with the formal aspects of language which can be studied independently of phonology and semantics. But since this book focuses on the investigation of phenomena in the framework of generative grammar, the definition of grammar is different: it is understood as the entire system of structural relationships, subsuming phonology, semantics, and syntax. In these terms, syntax is a subsystem of grammar which studies the interrelationships between elements of sentence structure and the rules which govern it. Thus, in the following when we talk about theoretical aspects concerning the entire system, we will use the term grammatical theory. In parts II and III of the book we will concentrate on a number of syntactic phenomena which will be predominantly explained in the framework of generative grammar. Shortly you will also see that syntax as a subdiscipline did not exist for a long time, so we will deal with grammar first and only later talk about syntax.

2 The Greeks and Romans and the first grammatical theory

2.1 Philosophical foundations of grammatical theory

As with many other things, it was the Greeks of the fifth and fourth centuries BC who started studying language in a systematic way and who set the agenda for discussing the most fundamental questions of linguistics in the western world (which is to say that this book focusses on Europe leaving out the development of linguistics in countries like India or China). They dealt with the nature of the linguistic sign, including the relationship between sound and meaning, in more general terms the relationship between language, thought, and reality, the origin of language, the nature of language change, and the analysis of linguistic structure. As you can clearly see, these are all red-hot issues that keep linguists occupied (until) today.

But why, may you ask, were the Greeks the first Europeans who started to think about language? Well, it has something to do with the way they viewed the world, which again was new. Before the Greeks, for people of the ancient Near East the world was not inherently intelligible, all things happening depended on the will of capricious gods and deities. Under such circumstances, intellectual inquiry does not arise. Of course, the Greeks also had numerous gods, and would explain a natural phenomenon such as thunder in terms of the moods of Zeus (‘Zeus must be really angry today, he is thundering!’), but for them gods were not all-powerful, as opposed to the world view of the Persians or Egyptians, for example. So humans did have a free will; a nice piece of evidence can be found in the Iliad (eighth century BC) when Athena announces to Achilles ‘I have come down from heaven to put a stop to your wrath - if you consent [emphasis inserted, CT]’ (in Law (2003, 15)).

This gradual withdrawal from divine guidance led to more freedom and consequently to the development of the intellect. If gods are no longer responsible for everything then how do things happen? At that time people began to ask questions about the world, and the most general questions they sought answers to were: What is reality? Is there an absolute reality or is everything arbitrary, random and subject to change? Since the gods were no longer an authority in determining the world, people started to debate about these issues and arrived at different conclusions: intellectual disagreement was born.

During these debates and discussions a new philosophical question arose, namely, how can people claim to know about reality in the first place? And what does it mean to know something, and how is this knowledge acquired? That language plays a crucial role in answering these questions can be found directly and indirectly by pre-Socratic philosophers, the Sophists, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, although it should be kept in mind that only at the time of the Stoics did linguistic studies gain recognition independent of the vast field of philosophy (see below).

One of the groups that was particularly important at this time were the Sophists (fifth century BC) who taught men how to speak and which arguments to use in public debates. They showed an interest in language as an object of investigation and attributed meaning to grammatical structure. The background for their interest in language was the naturalist-conventionalist debate which actually affected all spheres of life, not just language. According to the naturalists (one proponent of which was Heraclitus), the shape of words and their meanings are based on natural affinity, whereas the conventionalists (one proponent of which was Democritus) claimed that this relation is based on convention and agreement. The most compelling pieces of linguistic evidence put forward by the naturalists were the etymology of words, onomatopoeia (e.g. cock-a-doodle-doo), and sound symbolism. The conventionalists’ arguments, on the other hand, were based on the assumption that words (vocabulary) can be changed at will (e.g. if speakers decided to refer to the concept...

Table of contents

• Titel
• Impressum
• Widmung
• Preface
• Inhaltsverzeichnis
• List of abbreviations
• Part I: The history of grammar
• Part II: Synchronic analysis of English syntax
• Part III: Diachronic analysis of English syntax
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index