Chapter 1
Actants, Actions, Ongoing States: Nouns, Verbs, and the Sentences They Form
Why Learn the Parts of Speech?
Nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositionsâisnât all this just mumbo jumbo? Words just stand for things, right? So why bother with all this jargon?
In Gulliverâs Travels, Jonathan Swift deals with this very issue. The âscientistsâ in part 3 of his 1726 novel have worked out a curious system of communication: people can carry around objects that they can show one another and thus mutely communicate. Speaking words wears out the lungs, the scientists have concluded. No need for multiple parts of speech hereâpeople just show each other objects (nouns) and get their ideas across through those things. Only âwomen ⊠the vulgar and illiterate ⊠the common peopleâ rebel against this innovation. Swiftâs joke is that nouns canât convey meaning by themselves, so using the system burdens one with donkey-loads of items. Here is how he describes it:
The other project was a scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever⊠. since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express a particular business they are to discourse on. And this invention would certainly have taken place, to the great ease as well as health of the subject, if the women, in conjunction with the vulgar and illiterate, had not threatened to raise a rebellion, unless they might be allowed the liberty to speak with their tongues, after the manner of their forefathers; such constant irreconcilable enemies to science are the common people. However, many of the most learned and wise adhere to the new scheme of expressing themselves by things, which has only this inconvenience attending it, that if a manâs business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged in proportion to carry a greater bundle of things upon his back, unless he can afford one or two strong servants to attend him. I have often beheld two of those sages almost sinking under the weight of their packs, like pedlars among us; who, when they met in the street, would lay down their loads, open their sacks, and hold conversation for an hour together; then put up their implements, help each other to resume their burdens, and take their leave. (Swift)
The joke is that in a materialistic culture, the things that people own speak louder than what they say. As we acquire more stuff, we become more communicatively burdened or blockedâless articulate, maybe less human.
Itâs also fairly clear that whatever âcommunicatingâ is taking place has to be fairly primitive. From a linguistic perspective, the whole project of communicating through only nouns would be limiting, if not impossible. Swiftâs scientists have engineered a ridiculous method: thatâs also what makes the passage funny. In English, fortunately, words are not just denotations of things. We use words for action, for joining, for emphasis, for description, and even for abstract ideas. Perhaps wealthy âsagesâ donât have to do too much communicating and have all the time in the world, but the rest of us regular folks, Swiftâs âcommon people,â donât. So we need multiple parts of speech.
Naturally this leads to the complications inherent in language use, which Swiftâs âsagesâ seem to be rebelling against. One of the problems with parts of speech, for example, is that we canât definitively divide up the dictionary into nouns, verbs, adjectives, and the like. Words find their ways into multiple categories. Any noun can probably be a verb, at least in some context: almost every day on my New Jersey Transit train, I hear the announcement, âThe last car will not platform at New Brunswick,â using a new verb, to platform, which means to stop at a place where, when the doors open, a platform will be right there, level with the floor of the railroad car. An example I recently heard on the radio also comes to mind. A man who bought his motherâs old car complained about how much he had to pay her: he said, âMy mom bluebooked me on the carâ (âMy Big Breakâ). (And, curiously, many verb-derived words, called âverbals,â function as nouns, or as adjectives, for that matter.)
Some linguists donât see the parts of speech as being as separate and distinct as I do (or as distinct as perhaps you were taught). Rather, they envision nouns, verbs, prepositions, and the like as existing on a âquasi-continuum.â This view, put forth in the 1970s by John Robert Ross, is sometimes called âsquish grammarâ or âfuzzy grammar,â and in it Ross posits a kind of hierarchy of parts of speech: verbâparticiplesâadjectivesâprepositionsânouns:
Proceeding along the hierarchy is like descending into lower and lower temperatures, where the cold freezes up the productivity of syntactic rules, until at last nouns, the ultimate zero of this space, are reached. (317)
Verbs have many tenses and forms (conjugations), while nouns can be only singular or plural. Ross concludes that âthe distinction between V[erbs], A[djectives], and N[ouns] is one of degree, rather than of kindâ (326), an idea that you might find persuasive and possibly helpful in terms of envisioning how the language works.
To give you some idea of how slippery all these categories are, letâs look again at âGarden Path Sentences,â which I introduced above. These are confusing, leading the reader down the wrong path, often because the reader misapprehends key wordsâ parts of speech. In the sentence âThe old man the boat,â for example, most readers take in the first three words as article, adjective, noun, and expect the next part of the sentence to be about what the old man does. But the sentence should be taken in as article, noun, verb, with the meaning âThe old people make up the crew of the boat.â
Hereâs the key: you need to figure out how words fulfill varying duties within a sentence. You need to intuitively grasp the inner workings of the English sentence.
While I canât cover every case, every nuance of the language (I refer you to Jespersen, Quirk et al., or Huddleston and Pullum for authoritative and complete guides), I can urge you to scrutinize more self-consciously both your own sentences and those of others. Seeing sentences as composed of various elements that work and interconnect in clearly established and logical patterns will, I hope, transform the way you envision and use language. But the goal isnât to make you into a pedantic nitpicker; instead, itâs to help you see and internalize the patterns of the English sentence. I want to sharpen your understanding of the language you produce and the language you encounter, to make you a better listener, and to enhance your writingâs communicativeness, exactness, and power.
Fundamentals
Nouns
Definition: Typically defined as âa word for a person, place, or thing,â a noun is usually the easiest kind of word to add to your vocabulary in a language. Remember that a âthingâ might be an abstract concept, that is, something intangible, imaginary, or even nonexistent: liberty, hatred, righteousness, hell, nirvana.
Verbs
Definition: A verb is usually described as a word denoting action. Verbs can also show a state of existence (with a to be verb, such as am, are, is, was, were, been, being) or possession (variations of to have). The International Herald Tribune article âPardon of Jailed Official Angers Sarkozyâs Foesâ includes the following sentence, whose verbs denote slow-motion, offstage-sounding action, but action just the same:
Jean-Charles Marchiani, 65, helped free French hostages in Lebanon in the 1980s and Bosnia in the 1990s, and served in the European parliament and as a governor in the south of France. (Derschau)
Helped free and served constitute the âactionâ of this sentence. Verbs can be words of âactionâ thatâs internal, action that is metaphoric, action that doesnât involve movement, or action that takes place over a long period of time.
Verbs embody and depict events taking place, incidents occurring, states of mind, and states of being. They show, as if filmically, what happens, is happening, happened, will happen, could happen, would happen. They also can âlinkâ one noun to another or to an adjective, setting up a rough equivalence.
Nouns and Verbs Together
Typically a noun and verb work together to create a sentence. But the noun has to function as a subject, and the verb must function as a predicate. The noun has to be the entity doing the action or existing, while the verb enacts what that noun is doing.
We know we have a full sentence via something called âsentence sense,â a term that some teachers and writers use, suggesting that recognizing a sentence is like smelling, feeling, tasting, hearing, seeing, or balance: it canât be taught; itâs almost instinctive, innate. Itâs sort of a seventh sense.
Here is one way to envision a sentence: If you enter a crowded room, and you have only a brief window of time to speak (i.e., a short interval during which everyone will momentarily hush and listen to you), what kind of utterance should you make? Only a full sentence will effectively convey a relatively clear and complete idea. This could be simply an interjectionââYes!!ââor it could be an imperative (command), such as âGet out!â or âParty!â all of which are complete without additional sentence elements. Were you to shout something that could not be construed as a sentence, it would probably provoke puzzlement or laughter: âMxyzptlk!â And a declaration such as âAmong!â or âPerhaps!â might have some limited communicative value, though Iâm not sure either would convey a ârelatively clear or complete ideaâ to a roomful of people. Perhaps this marks a limit to the crowded room scenario.
Think of a sentence as a Stand-Alone Linguistic Unit of Thought or Expression: a SALUTE. In what I am calling a âtypical sentence,â a âSALUTE,â you need a subject (note that in the command form this is implied: â[You] get out!â); you need a verb working with that subject; and that verb needs to have a tense: past, present, or future (or a perfective variant, i.e., with had, has, or have). But remember, the sentence has to be a SALUTE. Itâs something that might depend on antecedent or subsequent language, but it does not have to do so. While it is almost always offered within the context of a paragraph...