Understanding Sentence Structure

An Introduction to English Syntax

Christina Tortora

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781118659595
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Sintassi nella linguistica

A straightforward guide to understanding English grammar

This book is for people who have never thought about syntax, and who don't know anything about grammar, but who want to learn. Assuming a blank slate on the part of the reader, the book treats English grammar as a product of the speaker's mind, and builds up student skills by exploring phrases and sentences with more and more complexity, as the chapters proceed.

This practical guide excites and empowers readers by guiding them step by step through each chapter with intermittent exercises. In order to capitalize on the reader's confidence as a personal authority on English, Understanding Sentence Structure assumes an inclusive definition of English, taking dialect variation and structures common amongst millions of English speakers to be a fact of natural language.

• Situates grammar as part of what the student already unconsciously knows
• Presupposes no prior instruction, not even in prescriptive grammar
• Begins analyzing sentences immediately, with the "big picture" (sentences have structure, structure can be ambiguous) and moves through levels of complexity, tapping into students' tacit knowledge of sentence structure
• Includes exercise boxes for in-chapter practicing of skills, side notes that offer further tips/encouragement on topics being discussed, and new terms defined immediately and helpfully in term boxes
• Applies decades of findings in syntactic theory and cognitive science, with an eye towards making English grammar accessible to school teachers and beginning students alike

Understanding Sentence Structure: An Introduction to English Syntax is an ideal book for undergraduates studying modern English grammar and for instructors teaching introductory courses in English grammar, syntax, and sentence structure.

1
Let’s get Parsing!

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expected outcomes for this chapter

• You’ll acquire a basic sense of what linguists mean by “sentence structure.”
• Regardless of your belief that you know very little about sentence structure, you’ll see that you actually know quite a bit — and this will help you gain some confidence, for the chapters to come.
• You’ll become familiar with the following terms (see words in bold and term boxes): cognition, structure, parsing, ambiguity, constituent, modification, syntax, grammar, phrase structure rules, phrase structure trees, subject, noun phrase, verb phrase, hierarchical organization.

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1.1 some introductory words

The purpose of this chapter is to get us started immediately. I want you to see right away what sentence structure is, and how you already have the power to analyze — or parse — sentences. I want you to see that this power derives from your natural human disposition to automatically analyze strings of words as structured. Consider the immediately preceding sentence, for example. In fact, please read that whole sentence over again, starting with the words “I want you to see that this power …” Let’s write the sentence down; you can do this on a separate sheet of paper, so that you have it in front of you, all by itself. We’re going to analyze this sentence, and it’ll be easier to do that if we can look at it in isolation. Let’s give the sentence an example number, like “Example (1).” It’ll be useful to treat it like a specimen — like something we can dissect and examine. We’ll be doing a lot of this kind of thing in this book: analyzing individual sentences in isolation as a way to learn about sentence structure.

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Term Box 1

When we parse a string of words, we are mentally assigning structure to the string. We are thus analyzing the string as if it were a sentence in a language, with syntax. As humans, we naturally parse certain strings of symbols as linguistic structures without realizing we’re doing this — that is, we do it unconsciously. As syntacticians, we parse such strings consciously, with an eye towards understanding how humans structure such strings. Related words: parsing; parser

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Side Note 1: (Be proactive!)

You can learn a lot from this book, if you do what is suggested each step of the way. The more you do the mini‐exercises as you read, the more surely you’ll integrate everything into your knowledge and skill base.

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Have you written the sentence down and considered it? If you did, I bet you understood as structured as having something to do with strings of words. I’ll illustrate this in Example (1a), where I’ve indicated your mental grouping of these particular words with underlining):

What you did, mentally:

(1a)	I want you to see that this power you have derives from your natural human disposition to automatically analyze strings of words as structured.

So, I’m pretty sure you understood me to be saying that “strings of words” are “structured.” On the other side of the same coin, I bet you didn’t understand the words as structured to be associated with, say, the words your natural human disposition, as follows:

What you did NOT do, mentally:

(1b)	I want you to see that this power you have derives from your natural human disposition to automatically analyze strings of words as structured.

If I’m right, then it’s pretty amazing that you mentally put together the underlined words in (1a) automatically, without consciously thinking about it; it’s equally amazing that you didn’t put together in your mind the underlined words in (1b); so it’s not as though you thought that “structured” should have anything to do with “your natural predisposition.” Furthermore, it’s certain that you unconsciously put the words together in the way I think you did without anyone ever explicitly teaching you how to do it. In fact, it came so natura...