The purpose of this unit is to introduce some elementary grammatical terminology including word class labels, and the major clause components.
You have probably heard of the "parts of speech", i.e. grammatical classes into which we can put words. Most people know something about nouns, adjectives and so on, especially if they have studied a classical or foreign language. Refresh your memory in Activity 1.
ACTIVITY 1 Which of the following terms refer to a "part of speech"? noun adjective conjunction subjunctive accusative preposition pronoun adverb phrase verb passive article Turn to comments on activities |
There are several ways of dividing words into grammatical classes. One traditional method is based on the notion of reference which will be introduced in Unit 9. There are things/entities in the world, and words which refer to these things/entities are nouns. There are also actions, and words which refer to these actions are verbs. Nouns are "naming words" and verbs are "doing words". There are also qualities which we can ascribe to things. Words which name these qualities are adjectives. Then there are words which say something about the actions, for example how or when they are performed. These are known as adverbs. This method of word classification, while far from satisfactory, does successfully classify a very large number of words. Here are some examples in sentences:
quality adjective |
thing noun |
action verb |
description of action adverb |
Large Poor New |
sums Jim bridge |
disappeared suffered opens |
quickly dreadfully late |
ACTIVITY 2 Assign the following words to a part of speech category using the notional criteria summarised above. Try this once without looking the words up in a dictionary. Make a note of any problems you encounter. | ||
part of speech |
brief reason | |
oxygen difficult disperse Birmingham beautifully utterly you desperation slow early resemble thus |
||
Turn to Comments on Activities | ||
Modern linguistics prefers to talk of word classes rather than "parts of speech". In many school grammars eight to ten classes are listed, but it might surprise you to know that the distinction between nouns, verbs and adjectives did not become conventionally accepted until mediaeval times. Plato assigned verbs and adjectives to the same class, while later Greek grammarians grouped nouns and adjectives together. If we look outside English, especially at completely unrelated languages such as Chinese, the distinction between adjectives, prepositions and verbs is much harder to sustain, and even in English it is not always easy to assign words unambiguously to a class. They often seem to belong to more than one, or to hover uncomfortably between two.
In the case of nouns and verbs, the "thingness" or "actionness" of a word is often uncertain. A word such as departure surely refers to an action, yet it is unquestionably a noun. Weigh does not seem to refer to an action in a sentence like Does it weigh much? Yet weigh is certainly a verb. Moreover, there are word classes where it is difficult to find any obvious reference to anything in the world. Pronouns refer - he, she, it clearly point quite directly to entities, people in this case - but conjunctions do not seem to. What do because, if or although refer to?
Although there is no doubt that word classes have some connection with the way language refers to reality, linguistics assigns word classes on the basis of behaviour or function rather than on the basis of reference. This means that nouns belong to the same class because they behave in the same way, for example by being the subject of a sentence, or changing their form from singular to plural, both characteristics applying to nouns, but not to adjectives. The word departure may refer to an action, in a sense, but it does not behave in the way that verbs behave. For example, it cannot change its form to tell us something about the time of the action, as most verbs do. We do not say things like: The plane departured over an hour late. Likewise, although weigh does not seem to be very active, we do say things like the baby weighed 3.5 kilos, in which the form weighed clearly shows the time of this not very active event.
A great many words in English may be used as both verbs and nouns. Thus we have a book (n) and to book (v), a laugh (n) and to laugh (v) and so on. There is a general tendency for nouns to drift into becoming verbs, e.g. email (n) and email (v), with its past tense emailed. The opposite tendency is also well-established in the language, e.g. to go and a go. These shifts are part of the productivity of the language.
ACTIVITY 3 Which of the following are always verbs, which are always nouns and which can be either verb or noun? In the case of those which can be either, say which you think came first, the verb or the noun. sit chair seat stool bench drawer shelves bracket fix pigeon-hole Turn to comments on activities |
It is important to distinguish between class membership based on our knowledge of how a word typically behaves, and class membership in particular instances of use. Many words belong to two or more classes, as a result of their regular use in different grammatical contexts. We have already met some examples. However, speakers may also unilaterally reassign a word to a new class for a particular effect. If, just before dinner, someone says: "Have you gravied?", they presumably mean: "Have you made the gravy?" The reasons for taking the noun gravy and converting it into a verb are obscure; possibly the speaker himself does not know why he did this. It may be that making gravy is, or is considered by him to be, a bit of a palaver, and that the verb to gravy captures this better than the more literal to make the gravy. There are obviously limits to this, since if we constantly used nouns as verbs, or conjunctions as prepositions, the result would be confusion. Some kinds of reassignment are much more tolerable and likely than others. Noun to verb conversions are easily the most frequent in modern English, and even if to gravy is unlikely to catch on, plenty of other examples do. The next activity takes a jocular look at this phenomenon. First read this editorial from the Guardian:
Noun but the brave | |
1 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 |
NEXT WEEK we bury 1990. Let us now resolve to bury with it a practice which, in the closing months of the year, seemed increasingly to be defacing the English language: the pressing of decent defenceless nouns, which have gone about their business for centuries without giving the mildest offence or provocation, into service as verbs, sometimes in their original form but quite often after a process of horrible mutilation. Let us-as an official from the Severn-Trent Water Authority put it on the Today programme the other day -"example that for you." The BBC's admirable radio programme The World This Weekend, which used merely to be produced, is now said to be "studio-produced" by someone or other. Who invented this word? Since the BBC has managed without it for more than 60 years, why is it needed now? What in any case does it mean? The logical definition of the studio-producer's art must surely be the production of studios, an occupation which would seem to have more to do with the engineering staff than the folks in the control room. It is not the sort of thing you knock off in an hour on a Sunday. People who talk about sport are especially culpable. All this stuff about goals being "gifted": goals were never gifted in Stanley Matthews's day, any more than Denis Compton ever "top-scored" (as in "Larkins top-scored with 12 in England's second Innings"). Matches, in another sinister turn of events, are described as being "fixtured." We also have goals being "rifled", a process which Chambers defines in its transitive form as "to groove spirally": a footballing process, one might have thought, beyond the capacity even of Gary Lineker. Politicians also offend, especially in America, where the Al Haig tradition has provided the world with such usages as "to caveat." Nor can Westminster be exonerated in a year which gave us "doughnutting." Business and industry are even guiltier. "We are exiting the old year" the chairman of ICI informs his employees, while the chairman of the Chrysalis group declares that: "Profits were lower than the record levels achieved in 1989 after expensing a significant investment in new talent." A Brighouse businessman writes to the Times to complain that colleagues expect him to "diarise" his appointments: yes, even in Yorkshire. Everywhere (newspapers not excluded) people are faxing, tandying, modeming and even messaging. Take refuge in a restaurant and you may be told that your wine is delayed because it is being "room-temperatured." It is time that this business was stopped: or, to put it another way, that action to halt it was urgently prioritised. This kind of filthy talk is the work of the grandeur-deluded, the nuance-dead, and the jargon-confused, like the BR announcer who informed unfortunate passengers (or "customers", as they call them nowadays) that their carriage was being "detrained." Though, since some at least were heading towards institutions where they might be spending the day cooking up even more ghastly neologisms, perhaps he did us a service. |
ACTIVITY 4 Look at the table below, in which all the noun-verb conversions are extracted. In the columns to the right, say (a) whether you have seen the example before and (b) whether you would use it yourself. Finally, (c) say whether the newly coined verb has the identical form to the noun from which it comes, or whether it is modified. For example, we say a message but not *a diarise. Since 1990, the noun-verb email has become quite common. Are there any others which should be added to this list? | |||
seen before? |
use yourself? |
same/modified? | |
example (8) studio-produce (10) gift (18) top-score (19) fixture (21) rifle (21) caveat (26) doughnut (27) exit (28 expense (30) diarise (32) fax (34) tandy (34) modem (34) message (34) room-temperature (35-36) prioritise (38) detrain (41) |
|||
|
Turn to Comments on Activities | |||
For any given class, a number of features can be expected. Some words will be obvious members of the class, because they have all or most of the features. Others may be marginal members. Crystal (1987:92) explains this point very clearly.
Let us exemplify with adjectives and assume that there are two main ways in which we know whether a word is an adjective or not. First, adjectives come in front of a noun. From a semantic point of view, we can say that they "describe" the noun. This does not mean that anything which comes in front of a noun is an adjective. But adjectives may come in front of nouns. The second criterion is that adjectives can come after the verb be, and they then "describe" the noun which comes in front of be. The two positions are known as attributive and predicative. Here are some examples:
Adjective in front of noun (attributive position) |
Adjective after verb be (predicative position) |
a wonderful cake some ferocious fish |
the cake was wonderful the fish are ferocious |
Given these facts about adjectives, we can safely say that the following words are also adjectives: good, interesting, delicious, loud, scary etc. However, there are also plenty of adjectives which do not have both of these positional possibilities. Take the adjectives drunk and drunken . Generally, one comes in front of nouns, and the other after be. We still want to call them adjectives, but they are not quite as completely adjectival as the first group.
ACTIVITY 5 Using your own feeling about the language, say whether the following adjectives are used both attributively and predicatively (as most adjectives are) or just one or the other. Put a tick in the relevant column. Try adding more examples to the pred. only column. Finally, are there any of these which seem less obviously adjectival than others? | |||
both |
attrib. only |
pred. only | |
able asleep easy fond green marital prospective tantamount umbilical woollen |
|||
Turn to Comments on Activities | |||
Activity 3 shows that the allocation of words to a class according to behavioural characteristics is not as straightforward as it seems at first. We can examine this problem again in the case of nouns. The class of nouns is easily the largest in the language, accounting for as many as 75% of all words. Let us say that one characteristic of nouns is that they can occupy the subject and object position of a clause. If you are not sure what this means, try to pick it up from the following discussion.
Look at these examples:
1. Do you like cricket?
2. Do you like swimming?
3. Do you like batting?
4. Do you like watching cricket?
In clause 1, cricket is definitely a noun. Not only does it refer to a thing/entity, but it occupies the object slot in the clause - it is what the addressee likes. (In a clause such as Cricket is boring, Cricket occupies the subject slot in the clause.) In clause 2, we could use the same argument about swimming - and say that it is a sport like cricket, and again the object of the clause. Both words certainly feature in the Concise Oxford Dictionary as nouns. In clause 4, on the other hand, watching seems to be a verb - for two reasons. First, it has an object of its own, i.e. cricket . Second, if we want to say that this clause as a whole has an object, that surely has to be watching cricket (what the addressee likes), not watching. Therefore, watching is not the object, which removes one of the reasons for saying it is a noun. What about clause 3 and batting? Is batting in the same category as swimming, and therefore a noun, or like watching, and therefore a verb? The COD does list this as a noun (the action of hitting with a bat), but many people might say it is less of a noun than swimming. Incidentally, neither fielding nor bowling are listed as separate cricketing nouns by the COD. So are they nouns or verbs? There is in fact no easy answer to this question, and the example introduces the "instantial" nature of language. It may be the case that swimming is a noun in clause 1 above. But in I like swimming across the lake if it's not too cold, the word suddenly seems more verb-like. Linguists are quite tolerant of the idea that a word can belong to one class in one clause and a different class in a different clause, even though it means the same thing in both cases.
Consider now the case of words which come in front of nouns and seem to describe them. We have already said that this is a property of adjectives. But it is not necessarily the case that all words preceding nouns and describing them are adjectives. Look at these examples:
a woolly jumper
a woollen muffler
a wool overcoat
a wool shop
In each case we have a noun preceded by a word describing the noun. With woolly and woollen we are on safe ground if we call them adjectives. Woollen is nearly always attributive, but still an adjective. Wool is different. Sentences like this shop is wool never occur. This overcoat is wool seems much more possible, but it seems likely that most speakers interpret this to mean "made of the substance known as wool". Thus wool is a noun here. Using arguments like this, one can conclude that wool in a wool overcoat is in fact still a noun, even though it comes in front of the other noun and describes it. It is in fact a general property of nouns that they can be used for describing, defining - or, to use a more linguistic term, "modifying" other nouns. Here are some more examples of nouns referring to materials used in this way: a metal spike, marble steps, a chocolate biscuit, etc. The underlined words here are generally considered to be nouns, even though they are used in a very similar way to adjectives.
ACTIVITY 6 To which word classes would you assign the underlined words in the following sentences? Write down a brief justification for your choice. 1. I think you should state your aims more clearly. 2. Her room was in a terrible state. 3. We support state education. 4. Is that clear? 5. Clear off! 6. We weren't allowed to film the view of the river. 7. We weren't allowed to view the film of the river. 8. She played great in the final set. 9. She's a great player. 10. She played dead. Turn to Comments on Activities |
It is very difficult to define the word 'sentence'. Crystal (1987:94) claims that at least 200 different definitions are on record. In written English, the sentence is usually regarded as a stretch of language beginning with a capital letter and finishing with a full-stop. This is obviously not a grammatical definition, but we are all familiar with it and it is a useful enough rough guide to what a sentence is. The opening sentences of Dickens' Bleak House go like this: 'London. Michaelmas term lately over.' The language is telegraphic, almost note-form, perhaps because Dickens intends us to fix on a series of images. His text is like the verbal equivalent of a camera, first scanning across the city, and then zooming in, as he follows the path of the fog which penetrates into the fine detail of streets and buildings. Note-form language is usually casual, but here it is supremely skilful. The grammatical point to note is that telegraphic language lacks the full structure of formal written language, which normally consists of clauses.
Defining the word 'clause' is easier. Most definitions agree that a clause has certain structural properties, the most central of which is a verb. By this criterion, 'London' and 'Michaelmas term lately over' are not clauses, even though they are stylistic sentences. There are grounds for saying that the sentence is of limited usefulness as a unit of grammar. Despite this, the term is used a lot in grammatical work, so we need to have a narrower definition which excludes examples such as 'London'. The most useful working definition is 'a string of words which includes at least one free clause'. However, this simply drives us back to clauses again. We will return to the problem of sentences and clauses later in the course, but for now let us concentrate on the nature of the clause.
The central element of the clause is the verb. It is possible to have one-word clauses, where there is just a verb: 'Jump!' More usually, there is at least a subject: 'I fell.' Transitive clauses have an object as well: 'He smashed my castle'. In clauses where the verb is be, the noun following the verb is not the object but the complement: George III was a madman, This overcoat is wool. Clauses with be do not necessarily have a noun as complement. They may have an adjective, e.g. slugs are disgusting. It is possible to have 'subjectless' clauses, usually known as imperatives: Shut your mouth, Be a good boy.
Clauses often contain more information concerning the circumstances of whatever is stated by the more central elements listed above. For example: Jump quickly!, I fell off the table, He smashed my castle with his foot, He was a nuisance as a toddler, The new Vice-Chancellor is here. These additional elements we shall call adjuncts here. Look at the examples and relate them back to this brief summary.
Jump! |
V |
I + fell |
S+V |
That boy + smashed + my castle |
S+V+O |
Was + George III + a madman? |
V+S+C |
Slugs + are + disgusting |
S+V+C |
The new Vice Chancellor + is + here |
S+V+A |
He + was + a nuisance + as a toddler |
S+V+C+A |
Shut + your mouth |
V+O |
Be + a good boy |
V+C |
Passengers + must not speak + to the driver |
S+V+A |
Notice especially that clause elements may consist of one or more words. The name given in most grammars to examples such as my castle, as a toddler or must not speak, which act as a unit to occupy a clause element, is phrase. We shall use that term, but also the term group to mean the same thing.
ACTIVITY 7 Label the elements of the clauses in the following as S, V, O, C or A. You can do this by drawing vertical lines through each example to separate the elements. 1. She's a great player. 2. You should state your aims more clearly. 3. Cricket is boring. 4. He batted beautifully all day. 5. Mind the step! 6. Were the ancient Patagonians aliens? 7. The best things in life are free. 8. Did Villa win last night? 9. Ferdinand de Saussure is the father of modern linguistics. 10. Pooh rubbed his nose with his paw. 11. She played dead. 12. Seldom have I heard such utter rubbish. Turn to Comments on Activities |
