Christian Mair. English Linguistics. 2 nd edition. bachelor-wissen

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1 bachelor-wissen Christian Mair English Linguistics 2 nd edition

2 Contents Contents Preface: how to use this book IX 1 Introduction linguistic and other approaches to language Orientation Demonstration/discussion Problems and challenges Practice Phonetics and phonology the sounds of speech Orientation Sounds and letters: the need for a phonetic alphabet Sounds as sounds, and sounds as elements of linguistic systems: from phonetics to phonology Stress, pitch, intonation phonetics and phonology beyond the individual sound Demonstration/discussion Problems and challenges Practice Morphology and word-formation the structure of the word Orientation Free and bound morphemes Lexical and grammatical morphemes Demonstration/discussion: The major word formation strategies of present-day English Problems and challenges Practice Syntax I/general principles the structure of the clause Orientation Words, phrases, clauses and sentences Form categories and their grammatical functions Demonstration/discussion Basic strategies for the expression of grammatical relations Typological classification of languages Problems and challenges Practice V

3 CONTENTS 5 Syntax II/the fundamentals of English grammar Orientation Parts of speech Phrases The seven basic clause patterns Demonstration/discussion Problems and challenges Practice Semantics and lexicology the meaning of words Orientation Demonstration/discussion Problems and challenges Practice Pragmatics and discourse analysis Orientation Demonstration/discussion Problems and challenges Practice Applied linguistics, language teaching and translation studies Orientation Demonstration/discussion Problems and challenges Practice A pluricentric language standard Englishes around the world Orientation Demonstration/discussion Problems and challenges Practice Dialectology regional variation in English Orientation Demonstration/discussion Problems and challenges Practice Language in the city social and ethnic variation, multilingualism Orientation Demonstration/discussion VI

4 Contents 11.3 Problems and challenges Practice Language change and the history of English Orientation Old English period (c. 500 c. 1100) Middle English period (c c. 1500) Early Modern English period (c c. 1750) Modern English period (since c. 1750) Demonstration/discussion Problems and challenges Practice Past masters, current trends theorising linguistics for students of English Orientation Demonstration/discussion Problems and challenges Practice Linguistics and the public language myths, language politics, language planning and language rights Orientation Demonstration/discussion Problems and challenges Practice Glossary Index VII

5 Unit 5 Syntax II/the fundamentals of English grammar Orientation While Unit 4 was devoted to the study of some important general principles of syntax, the present Unit focuses on a more practical and mundane task to identify and name the parts or constituents of English clauses and establish the structural relationships that hold between them. In line with the framework established in Unit 4, we will start with a look at the parts of speech in English, i. e. the word classes which we arrive at when we categorise English words on the basis of their differing grammatical potential. We will then move on to a discussion of phrases, semi-autonomous grammatical constructions which are the immediate building blocks or constituents of other more complex phrases or of clauses. 5.1 From general linguistics to the grammatical description of present-day English Parts of speech The grammarians of ancient Greece and Rome have left us a grammatical classification of words which, in spite of its known weaknesses, has turned out to be surprisingly robust and is still at the heart of most modern taxonomies. They suggest a distinction between nouns (e. g. organisation, Peter, table), pronouns (e. g. he, them, who), adjectives (e. g. happy, sad), prepositions (e. g. in, on, from), verbs (e. g. govern, assimilate), adverbs (e. g. rapidly, here, yesterday), conjunctions (e. g. because, so that) and interjections (e. g. Oh!, Ouch!). To this we might add the category of articles (the, a, an), which is a useful one for the description of English but was not really needed for Latin. Parts of speech come in two major classes. Autosemantic words are those which have a fairly precise meaning by themselves, whereas synsemantic words express very general concepts such as spatial, temporal or causal relations and acquire specific meanings only in conjunction with autosemantic words. Thus, we do not need any context to get the meaning of the autosemantic noun railway station, whereas the preposition from or the definite article the, two synsemantic words, do not convey meaning in the same degree of specificity by themselves. They do so, however, in conjunction with railway station; from the railway station is very different from above or over the railway station, and from the railway station is different from from a railway station. Autosemantic words generally form open classes, which contain large numbers of members and can be expanded easily. Synsemantic words tend to form closed classes, with few members and only very occasional expansion or contraction Word classes Autosemantic and synsemantic words 73

6 SYNTAX II/THE FUNDAMENTALS OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR These are the major part-of-speech classes of present-day English. Table 5.1 Autosemantic parts of speech Autosemantic parts of speech Nouns English nouns are inflected for number (singular/plural: one girl several girls) and, particularly but not exclusively for nouns denoting human referents, for genitive case (e. g. the girl s book, the girls books, the book s cover). Noun phrases (the girls, the two American girls, all the girls who attended the course, ) typically function as subjects or objects in simple clauses. So do German nouns, but owing to the comparatively more synthetic design of German grammar, German nouns show considerably more inflectional complexity (number, case, gender inflection specific to declension classes). Verbs English verbs are inflected for tense (present/past), moderately also for person (3 rd person singular in the present tense) and for mood (indicative/subjunctive: God saves the Queen vs. God save the Queen). In addition to these purely inflectional forms there are many further complex analytical structures expressing tense, aspect and modality. In comparison to German, the obligatory aspect distinction (simple vs. continuous form: What do you read? What are you reading? ) is a striking feature of the verbal grammar of present-day English. Adjectives English adjectives are inflected for comparison if they consist of one syllable. They are graded analytically, with more and most, if they consist of three or more syllables, with some variation between synthetic and analytical comparison for di-syllabic adjectives. Adverbs Most English adverbs, in particular those derived from adjectives by adding -ly, function as autosemantic words: rapidly, unexpectedly, happily, etc. Table 5.2 Synsemantic parts of speech Synsemantic parts of speech Adverbs A small number of morphologically simple adverbs, e. g. more or therefore, express more abstract concepts than the open-class adverbs discussed above. Articles Present-day English has a definite (the) and an indefinite article (a(n)). Whether forms such as no as in he s no fool (= he s not a fool) should be included in this category is an open question. Pronouns Pronouns largely overlap with nouns in their grammatical function. Commonly distinguished sub-classes of pronouns are personal pronouns (I/me, you, he/him, she/her, it, we/us, they/them), demonstrative pronouns (this, that, these, those), indefinite pronouns (somebody, anybody, ), reflexive pronouns (forms ending in -self and -selves) or reciprocal pronouns (each other, one another). Prepositions Prepositions usually express relationships between nouns and noun phrases. The most common prepositions are morphologically simple and phonologically very light: for, from, in, etc. In addition, there are complex prepositions, which are morphologically complex and usually express more specialised relations: during, notwithstanding, on account of, etc. 74

7 ORIENTATION Unit 5 Conjunctions Conjunctions typically express relationships between clauses. There are co-ordinating (and, or, but) and subordinating conjunctions (because, that, while, ). Where are the weaknesses of this classification which have been alluded to above? One category which is a messy one if applied to present-day English is the pronoun. If defined as a pro or replacement form for a noun, the category works only for some of the pronouns mentioned above, for example the personal pronouns. Many indefinite pronouns function as pronouns in this sense but in addition they also display adjectival or adverbial properties to varying degrees. Compare, for example, the following uses of some: Pronouns and determiners What about the students? Did any turn up? Yes, some did but not many in fact. Some of the students even wore three-piece suits. Some students even wore three-piece suits. There is some interest in this subject, but it is limited. There were some five-hundred people present at the lecture. That was some party we had last night, wasn t it? The first two examples are pronouns in the narrow sense some stands in for the noun students. All following uses, however, display additional properties: for example, some in some five-hundred is an adverbial qualification, and some in some party is practically synonymous with a great party or a terrific party. In view of the obvious overlap between articles, pronouns and adjectives functioning in pre-nominal modification, new types of part-of-speech categories have been suggested in recent linguistics, for example a class determiner which comprises items such as a(n), the, all, both, each, some, many and others which all help to specify, quantify or otherwise determine the general meaning of the following noun. Phrases As has already been pointed out, it is not words which combine into clauses and sentences but phrases or constituents. The most common types of phrases are noun phrases (NP), prepositional phrases (PP), verb phrases (VP), adjective phrases (AdjP) and adverb phrases (AdvP). The phrases are named after their heads and include the heads and their dependents or modifiers. This is simple enough in the case of NPs, PPs, AdjPs and AdvPs, as is illustrated in the following examples, in which the respective heads are printed in bold: 75

8 SYNTAX II/THE FUNDAMENTALS OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR NP: the boy a boy who was playing in the sand PP: to another famous city notwithstanding the problems involved AdjP: better extremely keen to take part AdvP: right here much more easily than expected A verb phrase (VP) typically consists of a main verb, the auxiliaries which modify it, and those phrases or constituents other than the subject which are necessary to form a basic clause (see below). These are some examples, in increasing order of complexity. VPs: the roof [collapsed] VP last night the roof [could have collapsed] VP last night I [finished my term paper] VP last night I [put the alarm clock on the shelf] VP last night The phrase last night is not bracketed as part of the preceding VP because it can be dropped without making the sentence structurally incomplete. By contrast, my term paper, the alarm clock and on the shelf are bracketed because these phrases need to be there to make the verb phrase complete. In terms of the category-function distinction outlined in the previous unit, phrases, like words, are form-categories, and their function only becomes apparent in the context of the clause. For example, the prepositional phrase to another famous city functions as an object in the first of the two following examples, but as an adverbial of place in the second: this passage of the book refers [to another famous city] PP the coach took the tourists [to another famous city] PP The difference between the functional status of the PP in each case clearly comes out in the two different questions we can form: What does this passage of the book refer to? and Where did the coach take the tourists (to)? As the following example shows, phrases can be expanded to a considerable degree of complexity. The longish sentence: [the man] NP [read [an interesting book about the history of abstract painting in early twentieth-century Britain] NP ] VP Heads and modifiers of phrases consists of just three phrases as bracketed. the man illustrates a simple type of noun phrase, consisting of the noun itself and a determiner, the definite article. The dependency relation is such that the noun is conventionally seen as the head of the phrase and the determiner as the modifier. In principle this modifier-head structure is no different from that found in the long and complex noun phrase an interesting book about the history of abstract painting in early twentieth-century Britain. The noun book is the head of this noun phrase. It is premodified by the indefinite article an, the adjective interesting and postmodified by the prepositional phrase about the history of abstract painting in 76

9 ORIENTATION Unit 5 early twentieth-century Britain, whose structure is internally complex, as well. Similar expansion strategies can be applied in verb phrases, adjectival phrases or adverb phrases. The seven basic clause patterns Identifying the phrases which make up a clause (or any other complex construction) is the necessary first step in a proper grammatical analysis. By identifying a noun phrase, for example, you have identified a particular formal category. You have not said anything yet about its function in the clause. In this section, we will therefore look at the ways in which NPs, PPs, AdjPs and AdvPs serve to complement the verb (which, as has been pointed out in the preceding Unit, we assume to be the structural nucleus of the clause). In this way we can offer a full grammatical analysis. The technical terms used are largely those found in traditional grammar (e. g. subject, object) or in widely used reference grammars of English (e. g. complement of the subject), but care is taken to define them in such a way that they suit the facts of English. Superficially, there is an immense variety of different clause structures, and if you start analysing the clauses in any given text you might come to the depressing conclusion that no two are structured alike. Fortunately, this first impression is deceptive, and closer inspection reveals a relatively simple underlying mechanism. All simple sentences in English correspond to one of the seven basic clause patterns which are discussed and illustrated below: 1. subject + predicate SP 2. subject + predicate + subject complement SPC S 3. subject + predicate + adverbial SPA 4. subject + predicate + object SPO 5. subject + predicate + object + object SPOO Basic clause patterns Table 5.3 The seven basic clause patterns 6. subject + predicate + object + object complement SPOC O 7. subject + predicate + object + adverbial SPOA The patterns differ with regard to the number and type of constituents which are needed in addition to the subject to form a grammatical sentence. The simplest pattern (SP) is illustrated by examples such as the following: S We Tom The children P left. snores. are sleeping. As can be seen in the second and third examples, the grammatical relationship between the subject and the verbal predicate manifests itself not only 77