NOUN

SUFFIXES

-acy state or quality democracy, accuracy, lunacy

-al the action or process of remedial, denial, trial, criminal

-ance, -ence state or quality of nuisance, ambience, tolerance

-dom place or state of being freedom, stardom, boredom

-er, -or person or object that does a reader, creator, interpreter, inventor,
specified action collaborator, teacher

-ism doctrine, belief Judaism, scepticism, escapism

-ist person or object that does a Geologist, protagonist, sexist,

specified action scientist, theorist, communist

-ity, -ty quality of extremity, validity, enormity

-ment condition enchantment, argument

-ness state of being heaviness, highness, sickness

-ship position held friendship, hardship, internship

-sion, -tion state of being position, promotion, cohesion

VERB SUFFIXES

-ate become mediate, collaborate, create

-en become sharpen, strengthen, loosen

-ify, -fy make or become justify, simplify, magnify, satisfy

-ise, -ize become publicise, synthesise, hypnotise

ADJECTIVE
SUFFIXES

-able, -ible capable of being edible, fallible, incredible, audible

-al having the form or character fiscal, thermal, herbal, colonial

of
-esque in a manner of or resembling picturesque, burlesque, grotesque

-ful notable for handful, playful, hopeful, skilful

-ic, -ical having the form or character psychological, hypocritical,

of methodical, nonsensical, musical

-ious, -ous characterised by pious, jealous, religious, ridiculous

The job of grammar is to organize words into sentences, and there are many ways
to do that. (Or we could say, Words can be organized into sentences in many
different ways.) For this reason, describing how to put a sentence together isn't
as easy as explaining how to bake a cake or assemble a model plane. There are no
easy recipes, no step-by-step instructions. But that doesn't mean that crafting an
effective sentence depends on magic or good luck.

Experienced writers know that the basic parts of a sentence can be combined and
arranged in countless ways. So as we work to improve our writing, it's important
to understand what these basic structures are and how to use them effectively.

We'll begin by introducing the traditional parts of speech and the most
common sentence structures. For practice in shaping these words and structures
into strong sentences, follow the links to the practice exercises, examples, and
expanded discussions.

1. The Parts of Speech

One way to begin studying basic sentence structures is to consider the

traditional parts of speech (also called word classes): nouns, pronouns, verbs,
adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. Except for
interjections ("ouch!"), which have a habit of standing by themselves, the parts of
speech come in many varieties and may show up just about anywhere in a
sentence.

To know for sure what part of speech a word is, we have to look not only at the
word itself but also at its meaning, position, and use in a sentence.

2. Subjects, Verbs, and Objects

The basic parts of a sentence are the subject, the verb, and (often, but not always)
the object. The subject is usually a noun—a word that names a person, place, or
thing.

The verb (or predicate) usually follows the subject and identifies an action or a
state of being. An object receives the action and usually follows the verb.

3. Adjectives and Adverbs

A common way of expanding the basic sentence is with modifiers—words that

add to the meanings of other words. The simplest modifiers
are adjectives and adverbs. Adjectives modify nouns, while adverbs modify verbs,
adjectives, and other adverbs.

4. Prepositional Phrases

Like adjectives and adverbs, prepositional phrases add meaning to the nouns and
verbs in sentences. A prepositional phrase has two basic parts: a preposition plus
a noun or a pronoun that serves as the object of the preposition.

5. Four Basic Sentence Structures

There are four basic sentence structures in English:

 A simple sentence is a sentence with just one independent clause (also

called a main clause): Judy laughed..
 A compound sentence contains at least two independent clauses: Judy
laughed and Jimmy cried.
 A complex sentence contains an independent clause and at least
one dependent clause: Jimmy cried when Judy laughed.
 A compound-complex sentence contains two or more independent clauses
and at least one dependent clause: Judy laughed and Jimmy cried when
the clowns ran past their seats.

6. Coordination

A common way to connect related words, phrases, and even entire clauses is
to coordinate them—that is, connect them with a basic coordinating
conjunction such as "and" or "but."

7. Adjective Clauses

To show that one idea in a sentence is more important than another, we rely
on subordination—that is, treating one word group as secondary (or subordinate)
to another. One common form of subordination is the adjective clause—a word
group that modifies a noun. The most common adjective clauses begin with one
of these relative pronouns: who, which, and that.

8. Appositives

An appositive is a word or group of words that identifies or renames another

word in a sentence—most often a noun that immediately precedes it. Appositive
constructions offer concise ways of describing or defining a person, place, or
thing.

9. Adverb Clauses

Like an adjective clause, an adverb clause is always dependent on (or subordinate

to) an independent clause. Like an ordinary adverb, an adverb clause usually
modifies a verb, though it can also modify an adjective, an adverb, or even the
rest of the sentence in which it appears. An adverb clause begins with
a subordinating conjunction—an adverb that connects the subordinate clause to
the main clause.

10. Participial Phrases

A participle is a verb form used as an adjective to modify nouns and pronouns.

All present participles end in -ing. The past participles of all regular verbs end
in -ed. Irregular verbs, however, have various past participle endings. Participles
and participial phrases can add vigor to our writing as they add information to
our sentences.

11. Absolute Phrases

Among the various kinds of modifiers, the absolute phrase may be the least
common but one of the most useful. An absolute phrase, which consists of a noun
plus at least one other word, adds details to an entire sentence—details that often
describe one aspect of someone or something mentioned elsewhere in the
sentence.

12. Four Functional Types of Sentences

There are four main types of sentences that can be distinguished by their function
and purpose:

 A declarative sentence makes a statement: Babies cry.

 An interrogative sentence poses a question: Why do babies cry?
  An imperative sentence gives instructions or expresses a request or
demand: Please be quiet.
 An exclamatory sentence expresses strong feelings by making an
exclamation: Shut up!

Grammatical Structure of the English Language

June 25, 2011 at 5:01pm

Languages may be synthetic and analytical to their grammatical structure. In synthetic languages, such as
German, Greek, Polish, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Finish, Turkish, Japanese, etc, the grammatical relations
between words are expressed by means of inflections.

In analytical language (or isolating), such as English, the grammatical relations between words are expressed
by means of form words and word order.
Analytical forms are mostly proper to verbs. An analytical verb-form consists of one or more form words,
which have no lexical meaning and only express one or more of the grammatical categories of person, number,
tense, aspect, voice, mood and one notional word, generally infinitive or a participle: e.g. He has come, I am
reading.
However, the structure of a language is never purely synthetic or purely analytical. Accordingly in the English
language there are:
1. Endings:
-s in the third form singular in the Present Simple He speakS
-s in the plural of nouns GirlS
-s in the genitive case my brother’S book
-ed in the Past Simple worked

2. Inner flexion – man – men, speak – spoke

3. The synthetic forms of the Subjunctive Mood – were, be, have, etc.

Introduction: This page contains some basic information about sentence

structure (syntax) and sentence types. It also includes examples of common
sentence problems in written English. ESL students who understand the
information on this page and follow the advice have a better chance of
writing well. [Note to teachers/advanced students]

Definition: Linguists have problems in agreeing how to define the word sentence. For this
web page, sentence will be taken to mean: 'a sequence of words whose first word starts
with a capital letter and whose last word is followed by an end punctuation mark (period/full
stop or question mark or exclamation mark)'. On the basis of this definition, some of the
sentences written by ESL students (indeed by all writers) will be correct, and other
sentences will be problematic. Good readers (English teachers, for example!) can quickly
see the difference between a correct and a problematic sentence.

Subject/predicate: All sentences are about something or someone. The

something or someone that the sentence is about is called the subject of the
sentence. In the following sentences the subjects are shown in red. Note
how the subject is often, but not always, the first thing in the sentence.

 John often comes late to class.

My friend and I both have a dog named Spot.
 Many parts of the Asian coastline were destroyed by a tsunami in
2004.
 The old hotel at the end of the street is going to be knocked down
to make way for a new supermarket.
 Sitting in a tree at the bottom of the garden was a huge black bird
with long blue tail feathers.
 The grade 7 Korean boy who has just started at FIS speaks
excellent English.
 On Saturdays I never get up before 9 o'clock.
 Before giving a test the teacher should make sure that the students
are well-prepared.
 Lying on the sofa watching old films is my favourite hobby.

The predicate contains information about the someone or something that is

the subject. The example sentences above are shown again, this time with
the predicate marked in green.

 John often comes late to class.

My friend and I both have a dog named Spot.
 Many parts of the Asian coastline were destroyed by a tsunami in
2004.
 The old hotel at the end of the street is going to be knocked down
to make way for a new supermarket.
 Sitting in a tree at the bottom of the garden was a huge black
bird with long blue tail feathers.
 The grade 7 Korean boy who has just started at FIS speaks excellent
English.
 On Saturdays I never get up before 9 o'clock.
 Before giving a test the teacher should make sure that the
students are well-prepared.
 Lying on the sofa watching old films is my favourite hobby.
Do a quiz on the subject and predicate.

Simple subject/predicate: As you can see from the example sentences

above both the subject and the predicate can consist of many words.
The simple subject is the main word in the subject, and the simple
predicate is the mainword in the predicate. The simple subject is always
a noun/pronoun and the simple predicate is always a verb.

In the following sentences the simple subject is shown in red and the simple
predicate is shown in green.

 My ESL teacher speaks a little Russian.

 The young girl with the long black hair fell from her bike yesterday in
heavy rain.
 At the back of the line in the cafeteria yesterday was a large
brown dogwith a yellow collar around its neck!
 My friend and I are going on holiday together this year.
 Your mother or your father must come to the meeting.
 Sitting in a tree at the bottom of the garden was a huge
black bird with long blue tail feathers.

From the last three examples sentences above you will notice that the
simple subjects and simple predicates can be more than one word.

Advice: To write strong, clear sentences you must know who or what you
are writing about (subject) and what you want to say about them or it
(predicate). Your writing will be more interesting if the subject is not the first
thing in every sentence you write.

Do a quiz to identify simple subjects and predicates.

Sentence types: One way to categorize sentences is by the clauses they

contain. (A clause is a part of a sentence containing a subject and a
predicate.) Here are the 4 sentence types:

 Simple: Contains a single, independent clause.

o I don't like dogs.
o Our school basketball team lost their last game of the season
75-68.
o The old hotel opposite the bus station in the center of the town
 is probably going to be knocked down at the end of next year.

 Compound: Contains two independent clauses that are joined by a

coordinating conjunction. (The most common coordinating
conjunctionsare: but, or, and, so. Remember: boas.)
o I don't like dogs, and my sister doesn't like cats.
o You can write on paper, or you can use a computer.
o A tree fell onto the school roof in a storm, but none of the
students was injured.

 Complex: Contains an independent clause plus one or more

dependent clauses. (A dependent clause starts with a subordinating
conjunction. Examples: that, because, while, although, where, if.)
o I don't like dogs that bark at me when I go past.
o She did my homework, while her father cooked dinner.
o You can write on paper, although a computer is better if you
want to correct mistakes easily.

Note: A dependent clause standing alone without an independent

clause is called a fragment sentence - see below.
 Compound-complex: Contains 3 or more clauses (of which at least
two are independent and one is dependent).
o I don't like dogs, and my sister doesn't like cats because they
make her sneeze.
o You can write on paper, but using a computer is better as you
can easily correct your mistakes.
o A tree fell onto the school roof in a storm, but none of the
students was injured, although many of them were in classrooms
at the top of the building.

Advice: Writing that contains mostly short, simple sentences can be

uninteresting or even irritating to read. Writing that consists of mostly long,
complex sentences is usually difficult to read. Good writers, therefore, use a
variety of sentence types. They also occasionally start complex (or
compound-complex) sentences with the dependent clause and not the
independent clause. In the following examples the dependent clause is
shown in red:

 Although it was raining, we decided to go fishing.

 If it doesn't rain soon, the river will dry out.
 Because the road was icy and the driver was going too fast, he
was unable to brake in time when a fox ran into the road in front of
 him.

Note: Sentences can also be categorized according to their function. [More]

Note: Independent clauses are also called main clauses. Dependent clauses
are also called subordinate clauses.

Do a quiz to identify clause types. Do a quiz to identify sentence types.

Problematic 'sentences': To write a correct sentence, you need to have a

good understanding of what a sentence is. Students who don't have this
understanding, or don't take care, often include problem sentences in their
writing. Native English speakers are just as likely to write problem sentences
as ESL students. There are three main types of problem sentence:

 Run-on sentences: These are two sentences that the writer has not
separated with an end punctuation mark, or has not joined with a
conjunction. (Click the following run-ons to see where they should be
separated into two sentences.)
o I went to Paris in the vacation it is the most beautiful place I
have ever visited.
o It's never too late to learn to swim you never know when you
may fall from a boat.
o If you're going to the shops can you buy me some eggs and flour
I want to make a cake.
o I like our new math teacher, she always explains the work very
clearly.
o He was late to school again, his bus got caught in heavy traffic.

Advice: It is helpful to read your written work aloud. When you speak,
you will make natural pauses to mark the end of your sentences or
clauses. If there is no corresponding end punctuation mark in your
writing, you can be almost certain that you have written a run-on
sentence.
 Sentence fragments: Fragment sentences are unfinished sentences,
i.e. they don't contain a complete idea. A common fragment sentence
in student writing is a dependent clause standing alone without an
independent clause. In the each of the following examples the
fragment is the second 'sentence', shown in red:
o I don't think I'm going to get a good grade. Because I didn't
study.
o She got angry and shouted at the teacher. Which wasn't a very
 good idea.
o He watched TV for an hour and then went to bed. After falling
asleep on the sofa.
o She got up and ran out of the library. Slamming the door
behind her.
o I have to write a report on Albert Einstein. The famous scientist
who left Europe to live in the USA.
o After riding my bike without problems for over a year, the chain
broke. 40 kilometers from my house!

Advice: If your 'sentence' is a dependent clause, or it doesn't contain

both a subject and a predicate, then it is not a proper sentence. You
can often detect fragments if you read your writing backwards
sentence by sentence, i.e. from the last sentence to the first one. You
can usually correct a fragment by connecting it to the sentence before
or after it.

Good writers, who have a full understanding of the sentence,

occasionally choose to write a sentence fragment. So you may see
sentence fragments in the fiction or even some of the non-fiction you
read. As an ESL student, however, you should avoid fragments (except
when writing your own creative stories).
 Rambling sentences: A rambling sentence is a sentence made up of
many clauses, often connected by a coordinating conjunction such
as and, or, so.
o John usually gets up before 7 o'clock, but yesterday his alarm
clock did not ring, so he was still asleep when his boss called him
at 10.30 to ask where he was and tell him that he would lose his
job if he was late again.
o Although the blue whale has been protected for over 30 years
and its numbers are increasing, especially in the North Pacific,
where whale hunting has been banned, it is still at risk of
extinction as its habitat is being polluted by waste from oil
tankers and its main food, the plankton, is being killed off by
harmful rays from the sun, which can penetrate the earth's
atmosphere because there is a huge hole in the ozone layer over
Antarctica.

Advice: A rambling sentence is quite easy to spot. You have almost

certainly written one if your sentence contains more than 3 or 4
conjunctions. If you read the sentence aloud and run out of breath
before reaching the end of it, you have written a rambling sentence. If
your sentence stretches over many lines of writing, you have certainly
 written a rambling sentence and most probably a run-on sentence too.

Unlike run-ons or fragments, rambling sentences are not wrong, but

they are tiresome for the reader and one of the signs of a poor writer.
You should avoid them.

Do a quiz to identify problematic sentences.

General advice: If you are not sure whether you have written a good,
correct sentence, ask your teacher! And remember: The more you read in
English, the better a writer you will become. This is because reading good
writing provides you with models of English sentence structure that will have
a positive influence on your own written work.

Note: Good writing consists not only of a string of varied, correctly-

structured sentences. The sentences must also lead from one to the next so
that the text is cohesive and the writer's ideas are coherent. For information
on these two important concepts, go to the Language words for non-
language teachers page and click on Cohesion.

English grammar is the way in which meanings are encoded into wordings in the English language.
This includes the structure of words, phrases, clauses, and sentences, right up to the structure of
whole texts.
There are historical, social, cultural and regional variations of English. Divergences from
the grammar described here occur in some dialects of English. This article describes a generalized
present-day Standard English, the form of speech and writing found in types of public discourse
including broadcasting, education, entertainment, government, and news including both formal and
informal speech. There are differences in grammar between the standard forms of British, American,
and Australian English, although these are minor compared with the differences
in vocabulary and pronunciation.
Modern English has largely abandoned the inflectional case system of Indo-European in favor
of analytic constructions. The personal pronounsof Modern English retain morphological case more
strongly than any other word class (a remnant of the more extensive case system of Old English).
For other pronouns, and all nouns, adjectives, and articles, grammatical function is indicated only
by word order, by prepositions, and by the "Saxon genitive" (-'s).[1]
Eight "word classes" or "parts of speech" are commonly distinguished in
English: nouns, determiners, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions.
Nouns form the largest English word class, with verbs being the second largest word class. Unlike
many Indo-European languages, English nouns do not have grammatical gender (although many
nouns refer specifically to male or female persons or animals).

Contents
[hide]
 1Word classes and phrases
o 1.1Nouns
 1.1.1Noun phrases
 1.1.2Noun gender
o 1.2Determiners
o 1.3Pronouns
 1.3.1Personal pronouns
 1.3.2Demonstrative and interrogative pronouns
 1.3.3Relative pronouns
 1.3.4There as pronoun
 1.3.5Other pronouns
o 1.4Verbs
 1.4.1Verb phrases
o 1.5Adjectives
 1.5.1Comparison
 1.5.2Adjective phrases
o 1.6Adverbs
 1.6.1Adverb phrases
o 1.7Prepositions
o 1.8Conjunctions
o 1.9Case
o 1.10Declension
 2Negation
 3Clause and sentence structure
o 3.1Word order
o 3.2Questions
o 3.3Dependent clauses
o 3.4Other uses of inversion
o 3.5Imperatives
o 3.6Elliptical constructions
 4History of English grammars
 5See also
 6Notes and references
 7Bibliography
o 7.1Grammar books
o 7.2Monographs
 8External links

Word classes and phrases[edit]

Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs form open classes – word classes that readily accept new
members, such as the noun celebutante (a celebrity who frequents the fashion circles), similar
relatively new words.[2] The others are considered to be closed classes. For example, it is rare for a
new pronoun to enter the language. Determiners, traditionally classified along with adjectives, have
not always been regarded as a separate part of speech. Interjections are another word class, but
these are not described here as they do not form part of the clause and sentence structure of the
language.[2]
English words are not generally marked for word class. It is not usually possible to tell from the form
of a word which class it belongs to except, to some extent, in the case of words with inflectional
endings or derivational suffixes. On the other hand, some words belong to more than one word
class. For example, run can serve as either a verb or a noun (these are regarded as two
different lexemes).[3] Lexemes may be inflected to express different grammatical categories. The
lexeme run has the forms runs, ran, runny, runner, and running.[3] Words in one class can sometimes
be derived from those in another. This has the potential to give rise to new words. The
noun aerobics has recently given rise to the adjective aerobicized.[3]
Words combine to form phrases. A phrase typically serves the same function as a word from some
particular word class.[3] For example, my very good friend Peter is a phrase that can be used in a
sentence as if it were a noun, and is therefore called a noun phrase. Similarly, adjective
phrases and adverb phrases function as if they were adjectives or adverbs, but with other types of
phrases the terminology has different implications. For example, a verb phrase consists of a verb
together with any objects and other dependents; a prepositional phrase consists of a preposition
together with its complement (and is therefore usually a type of adverb phrase); and a determiner
phrase is a type of noun phrase containing a determiner.

Nouns[edit]
There are many common suffixes used to form nouns from other nouns or from other types of words,
such as -age (as in shrinkage), -hood (as in sisterhood), and so on,[3] although many nouns are base
forms not containing any such suffix (such as cat, grass, France). Nouns are also often created
by conversion of verbs or adjectives, as with the words talk and reading (a boring talk, the assigned
reading).
Nouns are sometimes classified semantically (by their meanings) as proper nouns and common
nouns (Cyrus, China vs. frog, milk) or as concrete nouns and abstract
nouns (book, laptop vs. heat, prejudice).[4] A grammatical distinction is often made between count
(countable) nouns such as clock and city, and non-count (uncountable) nouns such
as milk and decor.[5] Some nouns can function both as countable and as uncountable such as the
word "wine" (This is a good wine, I prefer red wine).
Countable nouns generally have singular and plural forms.[4] In most cases the plural is formed from
the singular by adding -[e]s (as in dogs, bushes), although there are also irregular forms
(woman/women, foot/feet, etc.), including cases where the two forms are identical (sheep, series).
For more details, see English plural. Certain nouns can be used with plural verbs even though they
are singular in form, as in The government were ... (where the government is considered to refer to
the people constituting the government). This is a form of synesis; it is more common in British than
American English. See English plural § Singulars with collective meaning treated as plural.
English nouns are not marked for case as they are in some languages, but they
have possessive forms, formed by the addition of -'s (as in John's, children's), or just
an apostrophe(with no change in pronunciation) in the case of -[e]s plurals and sometimes other
words ending with -s (the dogs' owners, Jesus' love). More generally, the ending can be applied to
noun phrases (as in the man you saw yesterday's sister); see below. The possessive form can be
used either as a determiner (John's cat) or as a noun phrase (John's is the one next to Jane's).
The status of the possessive as an affix or a clitic is the subject of debate.[6][7] It differs from the noun
inflection of languages such as German, in that the genitive ending may attach to the last word of the
phrase. To account for this, the possessive can be analysed, for instance as a clitic construction (an
"enclitic postposition"[8]) or as an inflection[9][10] of the last word of a phrase ("edge inflection").
Noun phrases[edit]
Noun phrases are phrases that function grammatically as nouns within sentences, for example as
the subject or object of a verb. Most noun phrases have a noun as their head.[5]
An English noun phrase typically takes the following form (not all elements need be present):
 DETERMINER + PRE-MODIFIERS + NOUN + POSTMODIFIERS/COMPLEMENT

In this structure:

 the determiner may be an article (the, a[n]) or other equivalent word, as described in the
following section. In many contexts it is required for a noun phrase to include some
determiner.
 pre-modifiers include adjectives and some adjective phrases (such as red, really lovely),
and noun adjuncts (such as college in the phrase the college student). Adjectival modifiers
usually come before noun adjuncts.
 a complement or postmodifier[5] may be a prepositional phrase (... of London), a relative
clause (like ...which we saw yesterday), certain adjective or participial phrases (... sitting on
the beach), or a dependent clause or infinitive phrase appropriate to the noun (like ... that
the world is round after a noun such as fact or statement, or ... to travel widely after a noun
such as desire).
An example of a noun phrase that includes all of the above-mentioned elements is that rather
attractive young college student to whom you were talking. Here that is the determiner, rather
attractive and young are adjectival pre-modifiers, college is a noun adjunct, student is the noun
serving as the head of the phrase, and to whom you were talking is a post-modifier (a relative
clause in this case). Notice the order of the pre-modifiers; the determiner that must come first
and the noun adjunct college must come after the adjectival modifiers.
Coordinating conjunctions such as and, or, and but can be used at various levels in noun
phrases, as in John, Paul, and Mary; the matching green coat and hat; a dangerous but exciting
ride; a person sitting down or standing up. See § Conjunctions below for more explanation.
Noun phrases can also be placed in apposition (where two consecutive phrases refer to the
same thing), as in that president, Abraham Lincoln, ... (where that president and Abraham
Lincoln are in apposition). In some contexts the same can be expressed by a prepositional
phrase, as in the twin curses of famine and pestilence (meaning "the twin curses" that are
"famine and pestilence").
Particular forms of noun phrases include:

 phrases formed by the determiner the with an adjective, as in the homeless, the
English (these are plural phrases referring to homeless people or English people in general);
 phrases with a pronoun rather than a noun as the head (see below);
 phrases consisting just of a possessive;
 infinitive and gerund phrases, in certain positions;
 certain clauses, such as that clauses and relative clauses like what he said, in certain
positions.
Noun gender[edit]
Main article: Gender in English

A system of grammatical gender, whereby every noun was treated as either masculine, feminine
or neuter, existed in Old English, but fell out of use during the Middle English period. Modern
English retains features relating to natural gender, namely the use of certain nouns
and pronouns (such as he and she) to refer specifically to persons or animals of one or other
genders and certain others (such as it) for sexless objects – although feminine pronouns are
sometimes used when referring to ships (and more uncommonly some airplanes and analogous
machinery) and nation states.
Some aspects of gender usage in English have been influenced by the movement towards a
preference for gender-neutral language. Animals are triple-gender nouns, being able to take
masculine, feminine and neuter pronouns.[11] Generally there is no difference between male and
female in English nouns. However, gender is occasionally exposed by different shapes or
dissimilar words when referring to people or animals.[12]

Masculine Feminine Gender neutral

man woman adult

boy girl child

husband wife spouse

actor actress -

rooster hen chicken

Many nouns that mention people's roles and jobs can refer to either a masculine or a feminine
subject, for instance "cousin", "teenager", "teacher", "doctor", "student", "friend", and
"colleague".[12]

 Jane is my friend. She is a dentist.

 Paul is my cousin. He is a dentist.
Often the gender distinction for these neutral nouns is established by inserting the words "male"
or "female".[12]

 Sam is a female doctor.

 No, he is not my boyfriend; he is just a male friend.
 I have three female cousins and two male cousins.
Rarely, nouns illustrating things with no gender are referred to with a gendered pronoun to
convey familiarity. It is also standard to use the gender-neutral pronoun (it).[12]

 I love my car. She (the car) is my greatest passion.

 France is popular with her (France's) neighbors at the moment.
 I travelled from England to New York on the Queen Elizabeth; she (the Queen Elizabeth) is a
great ship.
Determiners[edit]
Main articles: English determiners and English articles
English determiners constitute a relatively small class of words. They include
the articles the, a[n], certain demonstrative and interrogative words such as this, that,
and which, possessives such as my and whose (the role of determiner can also be played
by noun possessive forms such as John's and the girl's), various quantifying
words like all, some, many, various, and numerals (one, two, etc.). There are also many phrases
(such as a couple of) that can play the role of determiners.
Determiners are used in the formation of noun phrases (see above). Many words that serve as
determiners can also be used as pronouns (this, that, many, etc.)
Determiners can be used in certain combinations, such as all the water and the
many problems.
In many contexts, it is required for a noun phrase to be completed with an article or some other
determiner. It is not grammatical to say just cat sat on table; one must say my cat sat on the
table. The most common situations in which a complete noun phrase can be formed without a
determiner are when it refers generally to a whole class or concept (as in dogs are
dangerous and beauty is subjective) and when it is a name (Jane, Spain, etc.) This is discussed
in more detail at English articles and Zero article in English.

Pronouns[edit]
Pronouns are a relatively small, closed class of words that function in the place of nouns or noun
phrases. They include personal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns, relative
pronouns, interrogative pronouns, and some others, mainly indefinite pronouns.
Personal pronouns[edit]
Main article: English personal pronouns

The personal pronouns of modern standard English, and the corresponding possessive forms,
are as follows:

Possessive Possessive
Nominative Oblique Reflexive
determiner pronoun

1st
pers. I me myself my mine
sing.

2nd
pers.
you you yourself/yourselves your yours
sing./
pl.

3rd
she, he, the her, him, the herself, himself, themself her, his, their hers, his, their
pers.
y, it m, it , itself , its s, its
sing.
1st
pers. we us ourselves our ours
pl.

3rd
pers. they them themselves their theirs
pl.

The second-person forms such as you are used with both singular and plural reference. In the
Southern United States, y'all (you all) is used as a plural form, and various other phrases such
as you guys are used in other places. An archaic set of second-person pronouns used for
singular reference is thou, thee, thyself, thy, thine, which are still used in religious services and
can be seen in older works, such as Shakespeare's - in such texts, the you set of pronouns are
used for plural reference, or with singular reference as a formal V-form. You can also be used as
an indefinite pronoun, referring to a person in general (see generic you) compared to the more
formal alternative, one (reflexive oneself, possessive one's).
The third-person singular forms are differentiated according to the sex of the referent. For
example, she is used to refer to a female person, sometimes a female animal, and sometimes
an object to which female characteristics are attributed, such as a ship or a country. A male
person, and sometimes a male animal, is referred to using he. In other cases it can be used.
(See Gender in English.) The word it can also be used as a dummy subject, in sentences like It
is going to be sunny this afternoon.
The third-person plural forms such as they are sometimes used with singular reference, as
a gender-neutral pronoun, as in each employee should ensure they tidy their desk. Despite its
long history, this usage is sometimes considered ungrammatical. (See singular they.)
The possessive determiners such as my are used as determiners together with nouns, as in my
old man, some of his friends. The second possessive forms like mine are used when they do not
qualify a noun: as pronouns, as in mine is bigger than yours, and as predicates, as in this one is
mine. Note also the construction a friend of mine (meaning "someone who is my friend").
See English possessive for more details.
Demonstrative and interrogative pronouns[edit]
The demonstrative pronouns of English are this (plural these), and that (plural those), as
in these are good, I like that. Note that all four words can also be used as determiners (followed
by a noun), as in those cars. They can also form the alternative pronominal expressions this/that
one, these/those ones.
The interrogative pronouns are who, what, and which (all of them can take the suffix -ever for
emphasis). The pronoun who refers to a person or people; it has an oblique form whom(though
in informal contexts this is usually replaced by who), and a possessive form (pronoun or
determiner) whose. The pronoun what refers to things or abstracts. The word whichis used to
ask about alternatives from what is seen as a closed set: which (of the books) do you like
best? (It can also be an interrogative determiner: which book?; this can form the alternative
pronominal expressions which one and which ones.) Which, who, and what can be either
singular or plural, although who and what often take a singular verb regardless of any supposed
number. For more information see who.
All the interrogative pronouns can also be used as relative pronouns; see below for more details.
Relative pronouns[edit]
Main article: English relative clauses

For "who/whom" and related forms, see Who (pronoun).

The main relative pronouns in English are who (with its derived forms whom and whose), which,
and that.[13]
The relative pronoun which refers to things rather than persons, as in the shirt, which used to be
red, is faded. For persons, who is used (the man who saw me was tall). The oblique case form
of who is whom, as in the man whom I saw was tall, although in informal registers who is
commonly used in place of whom.
The possessive form of who is whose (the man whose car is missing ...); however the use
of whose is not restricted to persons (one can say an idea whose time has come).
The word that as a relative pronoun is normally found only in restrictive relative
clauses (unlike which and who, which can be used in both restrictive and unrestrictive clauses).
It can refer to either persons or things, and cannot follow a preposition. For example, one can
say the song that [or which] I listened to yesterday, but the song to which [not to that] I listened
yesterday. The relative pronoun that is usually pronounced with a reduced vowel (schwa), and
hence differently from the demonstrative that (see Weak and strong forms in English). If that is
not the subject of the relative clause, it can be omitted (the song I listened to yesterday).
The word what can be used to form a free relative clause – one that has no antecedent and that
serves as a complete noun phrase in itself, as in I like what he likes. The
words whatever and whichever can be used similarly, in the role of either pronouns (whatever he
likes) or determiners (whatever book he likes). When referring to
persons, who(ever) (and whom(ever)) can be used in a similar way (but not as determiners).
There as pronoun[edit]
The word there is used as a pronoun in some sentences, playing the role of a dummy subject,
normally of an intransitive verb. The "logical subject" of the verb then appears as
a complement after the verb.
This use of there occurs most commonly with forms of the verb be in existential clauses, to refer
to the presence or existence of something. For example: There is a heaven; There are two cups
on the table; There have been a lot of problems lately. It can also be used with other
verbs: There exist two major variants; There occurred a very strange incident.
The dummy subject takes the number (singular or plural) of the logical subject (complement),
hence it takes a plural verb if the complement is plural. In informal English, however,
the contraction there's is often used for both singular and plural.[14]
The dummy subject can undergo inversion, Is there a test today? and Never has there been a
man such as this. It can also appear without a corresponding logical subject, in short sentences
and question tags: There wasn't a discussion, was there? There was.
The word there in such sentences has sometimes been analyzed as an adverb, or as a
dummy predicate, rather than as a pronoun.[15] However, its identification as a pronoun is most
consistent with its behavior in inverted sentences and question tags as described above.
Because the word there can also be a deictic adverb (meaning "at/to that place"), a sentence
like There is a river could have either of two meanings: "a river exists" (with there as a pronoun),
and "a river is in that place" (with there as an adverb). In speech, the adverbial there would be
given stress, while the pronoun would not – in fact the pronoun is often pronounced as a weak
form, /ðə(r)/.
Other pronouns[edit]
Other pronouns in English are often identical in form to determiners (especially quantifiers), such
as many, a little, etc. Sometimes, the pronoun form is different, as with none(corresponding to
the determiner no), nothing, everyone, somebody, etc. Many examples are listed as indefinite
pronouns. Another indefinite (or impersonal) pronoun is one (with its reflexive form oneself and
possessive one's), which is a more formal alternative to generic you.[16]

Verbs[edit]
Main article: English verbs

The basic form of an English verb is not generally marked by any ending, although there are
certain suffixes that are frequently used to form verbs, such as -ate (formulate), -fy(electrify),
and -ise/ize (realise/realize).[17] Many verbs also contain prefixes, such un- (unmask), out-
(outlast), over- (overtake), and under- (undervalue).[17] Verbs can also be formed from nouns
and adjectives by zero derivation, as with the verbs snare, nose, dry, and calm.
Most verbs have three or four inflected forms in addition to the base form: a third-person singular
present tense form in -(e)s (writes, botches), a present participle and gerund form in -
ing (writing), a past tense (wrote), and – though often identical to the past tense form – a past
participle (written). Regular verbs have identical past tense and past participle forms in -ed, but
there are 100 or so irregular English verbs with different forms (see list). The
verbs have, do and say also have irregular third-person present tense forms
(has, does /dʌz/, says /sɛz/). The verb be has the largest number of irregular forms (am, is,
are in the present tense, was, were in the past tense, been for the past participle).
Most of what are often referred to as verb tenses (or sometimes aspects) in English are formed
using auxiliary verbs. Apart from what are called the simple present (write, writes) and simple
past (wrote), there are also continuous (progressive) forms (am/is/are/was/were
writing), perfect forms (have/has/had written, and the perfect continuous have/has/had been
writing), future forms (will write, will be writing, will have written, will have been writing),
and conditionals (also called "future in the past") with would in place of will. The
auxiliaries shall and should sometimes replace will and would in the first person. For the uses of
these various verb forms, see English verbs and English clause syntax.
The basic form of the verb (be, write, play) is used as the infinitive, although there is also a "to-
infinitive" (to be, to write, to play) used in many syntactical constructions. There are also
infinitives corresponding to other aspects: (to) have written, (to) be writing, (to) have been
writing. The second-person imperative is identical to the (basic) infinitive; other imperative forms
may be made with let (let us go, or let's go; let them eat cake).
A form identical to the infinitive can be used as a present subjunctive in certain contexts: It is
important that he follow them or ... that he be committed to the cause. There is also a past
subjunctive (distinct from the simple past only in the possible use of were instead of was), used
in some conditional sentences and similar: if I were (or was) rich ...; were he to arrive now ...; I
wish she were (or was) here. For details see English subjunctive.
The passive voice is formed using the verb be (in the appropriate tense or form) with the past
participle of the verb in question: cars are driven, he was killed, I am being tickled, it is nice to be
pampered, etc. The performer of the action may be introduced in a prepositional phrase
with by (as in they were killed by the invaders).
The English modal verbs consist of the core
modals can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would, as well as ought (to), had better,
and in some uses dare and need.[18]These do not inflect for person or number,[18] and do not have
infinitive or participle forms (except synonyms, as with be/being/been able (to) for the
modals can/could). The modals are used with the basic infinitive form of a verb (I can swim, he
may be killed, we dare not move, need they go?), except for ought, which takes to (you ought to
go).
The copula be, along with the modal verbs and the other auxiliaries, form a distinct class,
sometimes called "special verbs" or simply "auxiliaries".[19] These have different syntax from
ordinary lexical verbs, especially in that they make their interrogative forms by
plain inversion with the subject, and their negative forms by adding not after the verb (could I ...?
I could not ...). Apart from those already mentioned, this class may also include used
to (although the forms did he use to? and he didn't use to are also found), and
sometimes haveeven when not an auxiliary (forms like have you a sister? and he hadn't a
clue are possible, though becoming less common). It also includes the auxiliary do (does, did);
this is used with the basic infinitive of other verbs (those not belonging to the "special verbs"
class) to make their question and negation forms, as well as emphatic forms (do I like you?; he
doesn't speak English; we did close the fridge). For more details of this, see do-support.
Some forms of the copula and auxiliaries often appear as contractions, as in I'm for I
am, you'd for you would or you had, and John's for John is. Their negated forms with
following not are also often contracted (see § Negation below). For detail see English auxiliaries
and contractions.
Verb phrases[edit]
A verb together with its dependents, excluding its subject, may be identified as a verb
phrase (although this concept is not acknowledged in all theories of grammar[20]). A verb phrase
headed by a finite verb may also be called a predicate. The dependents may be objects,
complements, and modifiers (adverbs or adverbial phrases). In English, objects and
complements nearly always come after the verb; a direct object precedes other complements
such as prepositional phrases, but if there is an indirect object as well, expressed without a
preposition, then that precedes the direct object: give me the book, but give the book to me.
Adverbial modifiers generally follow objects, although other positions are possible (see
under § Adverbs below). Certain verb–modifier combinations, particularly when they have
independent meaning (such as take on and get up), are known as "phrasal verbs".
For details of possible patterns, see English clause syntax. See the Non-finite clauses section of
that article for verb phrases headed by non-finite verb forms, such as infinitives and participles.

Adjectives[edit]
English adjectives, as with other word classes, cannot in general be identified as such by their
form,[21] although many of them are formed from nouns or other words by the addition of a suffix,
such as -al (habitual), -ful (blissful), -ic (atomic), -ish (impish, youngish), -ous (hazardous), etc.;
or from other adjectives using a prefix: disloyal, irredeemable, unforeseen, overtired.
Adjectives may be used attributively, as part of a noun phrase (nearly always preceding the
noun they modify; for exceptions see postpositive adjective), as in the big house,
or predicatively, as in the house is big. Certain adjectives are restricted to one or other use; for
example, drunken is attributive (a drunken sailor), while drunk is usually predicative (the sailor
was drunk).
Comparison[edit]
Many adjectives have comparative and superlative forms in -er and -est,[22] such
as faster and fastest (from the positive form fast). Spelling rules which maintain pronunciation
apply to suffixing adjectives just as they do for similar treatment of regular past tense formation;
these cover consonant doubling (as in bigger and biggest, from big) and the change of y to iafter
consonants (as in happier and happiest, from happy).
The adjectives good and bad have the irregular forms better, best and worse, worst;
also far becomes farther, farthest or further, furthest. The adjective old (for which the
regular older and oldest are usual) also has the irregular forms elder and eldest, these generally
being restricted to use in comparing siblings and in certain independent uses. For the
comparison of adverbs, see Adverbs below.
Many adjectives, however, particularly those that are longer and less common, do not have
inflected comparative and superlative forms. Instead, they can be qualified with more and most,
as in beautiful, more beautiful, most beautiful (this construction is also sometimes used even for
adjectives for which inflected forms do exist).
Certain adjectives are classed as ungradable.[22] These represent properties that cannot be
compared on a scale; they simply apply or do not, as with pregnant, dead, unique.
Consequently, comparative and superlative forms of such adjectives are not normally used,
except in a figurative, humorous or imprecise context. Similarly, such adjectives are not normally
qualified with modifiers of degree such as very and fairly, although with some of them it is
idiomatic to use adverbs such as completely. Another type of adjectives sometimes considered
ungradable is those that represent an extreme degree of some property, such
as delicious and terrified.
Adjective phrases[edit]
An adjective phrase is a group of words that plays the role of an adjective in a sentence. It
usually has a single adjective as its head, to which modifiers and complements may be added.[23]
Adjectives can be modified by a preceding adverb or adverb phrase, as in very warm, truly
imposing, more than a little excited. Some can also be preceded by a noun or quantitative
phrase, as in fat-free, two-metre-long.
Complements following the adjective may include:

 prepositional phrases: proud of him, angry at the screen, keen on breeding toads;
 infinitive phrases: anxious to solve the problem, easy to pick up;
 content clauses, i.e. that clauses and certain others: certain that he was right, unsure where
they are;
 after comparatives, phrases or clauses with than: better than you, smaller than I had
imagined.
An adjective phrase may include both modifiers before the adjective and a complement after it,
as in very difficult to put away.
Adjective phrases containing complements after the adjective cannot normally be used as
attributive adjectives before a noun. Sometimes they are used attributively after the noun, as in a
woman proud of being a midwife (where they may be converted into relative clauses: a woman
who is proud of being a midwife), but it is wrong to say *a proud of being a midwife woman.
Exceptions include very brief and often established phrases such as easy-to-use. (Certain
complements can be moved to after the noun, leaving the adjective before the noun, as in a
better man than you, a hard nut to crack.)
Certain attributive adjective phrases are formed from other parts of speech, without any
adjective as their head, as in a two-bedroom house, a no-jeans policy.

Adverbs[edit]
Adverbs perform a wide range of functions. They typically modify verbs (or verb phrases),
adjectives (or adjectival phrases), or other adverbs (or adverbial phrases).[24] However, adverbs
also sometimes qualify noun phrases (only the boss; quite a lovely place), pronouns and
determiners (almost all), prepositional phrases (halfway through the movie), or whole
sentences, to provide contextual comment or indicate an attitude (Frankly, I don't believe
you).[25] They can also indicate a relationship between clauses or sentences (He died,
and consequently I inherited the estate).[25]
Many English adverbs are formed from adjectives by adding the ending -ly, as
in hopefully, widely, theoretically (for details of spelling and etymology, see -ly). Certain words
can be used as both adjectives and adverbs, such as fast, straight, and hard. The adverb
corresponding to the adjective good is well (note that bad forms the regular badly, although ill is
occasionally used in some phrases).
There are also many adverbs that are not derived from adjectives,[24] including adverbs of time,
of frequency, of place, of degree and with other meanings. Some suffixes that are commonly
used to form adverbs from nouns are -ward[s] (as in homeward[s]) and -wise (as in lengthwise).
Most adverbs form comparatives and superlatives by modification
with more and most: often, more often, most often; smoothly, more smoothly, most
smoothly (see also comparison of adjectives, above). However, a few adverbs retain irregular
inflection for comparative and superlative forms:[24] much, more, most; a
little, less, least; well, better, best; badly, worse, worst; far, further (farther), furthest (farthest); or
follow the regular adjectival inflection: fast, faster, fastest; soon, sooner, soonest; etc.
Adverbs indicating the manner of an action are generally placed after the verb and its objects
(We considered the proposal carefully), although other positions are often possible
(We carefully considered the proposal). Many adverbs of frequency, degree, certainty, etc.
(such as often, always, almost, probably, and various others such as just) tend to be placed
before the verb (they usually have chips), although if there is an auxiliary or other "special verb"
(see § Verbs above), then the normal position for such adverbs is after that special verb (or after
the first of them, if there is more than one): I have just finished the crossword; She
can usually manage a pint; We are never late; You might possibly have been unconscious.
Adverbs that provide a connection with previous information (such as next, then, however), and
those that provide the context (such as time or place) for a sentence, are typically placed at the
start of the sentence: Yesterday we went on a shopping expedition.[26]
A special type of adverb is the adverbial particle used to form phrasal verbs (such as up in pick
up, on in get on, etc.) If such a verb also has an object, then the particle may precede or follow
the object, although it will normally follow the object if the object is a pronoun (pick the pen
up or pick up the pen, but pick it up).
Adverb phrases[edit]
An adverb phrase is a phrase that acts as an adverb within a sentence.[27] An adverb phrase may
have an adverb as its head, together with any modifiers (other adverbs or adverb phrases) and
complements, analogously to the adjective phrases described above. For example: very
sleepily; all too suddenly; oddly enough; perhaps shockingly for us.
Another very common type of adverb phrase is the prepositional phrase, which consists of a
preposition and its object: in the pool; after two years; for the sake of harmony.

Prepositions[edit]
Prepositions form a closed word class,[25] although there are also certain phrases that serve as
prepositions, such as in front of. A single preposition may have a variety of meanings, often
including temporal, spatial and abstract. Many words that are prepositions can also serve as
adverbs. Examples of common English prepositions (including phrasal instances)
are of, in, on, over, under, to, from, with, in front
of, behind, opposite, by, before, after, during, through, in spite of or despite, between, among,
etc.
A preposition is usually used with a noun phrase as its complement. A preposition together with
its complement is called a prepositional phrase.[28] Examples are in England, under the
table, after six pleasant weeks, between the land and the sea. A prepositional phrase can be
used as a complement or post-modifier of a noun in a noun phrase, as in the man in the car, the
start of the fight; as a complement of a verb or adjective, as in deal with the problem, proud of
oneself; or generally as an adverb phrase (see above).
English allows the use of "stranded" prepositions. This can occur in interrogative and relative
clauses, where the interrogative or relative pronoun that is the preposition's complement is
moved to the start (fronted), leaving the preposition in place. This kind of structure is avoided in
some kinds of formal English. For example:

 What are you talking about? (Possible alternative version: About what are you talking?)
 The song that you were listening to ... (more formal: The song to which you were listening ...)
Notice that in the second example the relative pronoun that could be omitted.
Stranded prepositions can also arise in passive voice constructions and other uses of
passive past participial phrases, where the complement in a prepositional phrase can
become zero in the same way that a verb's direct object would: it was looked at; I will be
operated on; get your teeth seen to. The same can happen in certain uses
of infinitive phrases: he is nice to talk to; this is the page to make copies of.

Conjunctions[edit]
Conjunctions express a variety of logical relations between items, phrases, clauses and
sentences.[29] The principal coordinating conjunctions in English are and, or, and but, as well
as nor, so, yet, and for. These can be used in many grammatical contexts to link two or more
items of equal grammatical status,[29] for example:

 Noun phrases combined into a longer noun phrase, such as John, Eric, and Jill, the red coat
or the blue one. When and is used, the resulting noun phrase is plural. A determiner does
not need to be repeated with the individual elements: the cat, the dog, and the
mouse and the cat, dog, and mouse are both correct. The same applies to other modifiers.
(The word but can be used here in the sense of "except": nobody but you.)
 Adjective or adverb phrases combined into a longer adjective or adverb phrase: tired but
happy, over the fields and far away.
 Verbs or verb phrases combined as in he washed, peeled, and diced the turnips (verbs
conjoined, object shared); he washed the turnips, peeled them, and diced them (full verb
phrases, including objects, conjoined).
 Other equivalent items linked, such as prefixes linked in pre- and post-test
counselling,[30] numerals as in two or three buildings, etc.
 Clauses or sentences linked, as in We came, but they wouldn't let us in. They wouldn't let us
in, nor would they explain what we had done wrong.
There are also correlative conjunctions, where as well as the basic conjunction, an additional
element appears before the first of the items being linked.[29] The common correlatives in English
are:

 either ... or (either a man or a woman);

 neither ... nor (neither clever nor funny);
 both ... and (they both punished and rewarded them);
 not ... but, particularly in not only ... but also (not exhausted but exhilarated, not only football
but also many other sports).
Subordinating conjunctions make relations between clauses, making the clause in which they
appear into a subordinate clause.[31] Some common subordinating conjunctions in English are:

 conjunctions of time, including after, before, since, until, when, while;

 conjunctions of cause and effect, including because, since, now that, as, in order that, so;
 conjunctions of opposition or concession, such as although, though, even
though, whereas, while;
 conjunctions of condition: such as if, unless, only if, whether or not, even if, in case (that);
 the conjunction that, which produces content clauses, as well as words that produce
interrogative content clauses: whether, where, when, how, etc.
A subordinating conjunction generally comes at the very start of its clause, although many of
them can be preceded by qualifying adverbs, as in probably because ..., especially if .... The
conjunction that can be omitted after certain verbs, as in she told us (that) she was ready. (For
the use of that in relative clauses, see § Relative pronouns above.)

Case[edit]
Although English has largely lost its case system, personal pronouns still have three
morphological cases that are simplified forms of the nominative, objective and genitive cases:[32]

 The nominative case (subjective pronouns such as I, he, she, we, they, who, whoever), used
for the subject of a finite verb and sometimes for the complement of a copula.
 The oblique case (object pronouns such as me, him, her, us, it, us, them, whom, whomever),
used for the direct or indirect object of a verb, for the object of a preposition, for an absolute
disjunct, and sometimes for the complement of a copula.
 The genitive case (possessive pronouns such
as my/mine, his, her(s), our(s), its, our(s), their, theirs, whose), used for a grammatical
possessor. This is not always considered to be a case; see English possessive § Status of
the possessive as a grammatical case.
Most English personal pronouns have five forms: the nominative and oblique case forms,
the possessive case, which has both a determiner form (such as my, our) and a
distinct independent form (such as mine, ours) (with two exceptions: the third person singular
masculine and the third person singular neuter it, which use the same form for both determiner
and independent [his car, it is his]), and a distinct reflexive or intensive form (such
as myself, ourselves). The interrogative personal pronoun who exhibits the greatest diversity of
forms within the modern English pronoun system, having definite nominative, oblique, and
genitive forms (who, whom, whose) and equivalently coordinating indefinite forms
(whoever, whomever, and whosever).
Forms such as I, he and we are used for the subject ("I kicked the ball"), whereas forms such
as me, him and us are used for the object ("John kicked me").[33]

Declension[edit]
Further information: Declension

Nouns have distinct singular and plural forms; that is, they decline to reflect their grammatical
number; consider the difference between book and books. In addition, a few English pronouns
have distinct nominative (also called subjective) and oblique (or objective) forms; that is, they
decline to reflect their relationship to a verb or preposition, or case. Consider the difference
between he (subjective) and him (objective), as in "He saw it" and "It saw him"; similarly,
consider who, which is subjective, and the objective whom.
Further, these pronouns and a few others have distinct possessive forms, such
as his and whose. By contrast, nouns have no distinct nominative and objective forms, the two
being merged into a single plain case. For example, chair does not change form between "the
chair is here" (subject) and "I saw the chair" (direct object). Possession is shown by the clitic -
's attached to a possessive noun phrase, rather than by declension of the noun itself.[34]

Negation[edit]
As noted above under § Verbs, a finite indicative verb (or its clause) is negated by placing the
word not after an auxiliary, modal or other "special" verb such as do, can or be. For example, the
clause I go is negated with the appearance of the auxiliary do, as I do not go (see do-support).
When the affirmative already uses auxiliary verbs (I am going), no other auxiliary verbs are
added to negate the clause (I am not going). (Until the period of early Modern English, negation
was effected without additional auxiliary verbs: I go not.)
Most combinations of auxiliary verbs etc. with not have contracted forms: don't, can't, isn't, etc.
(Also the uncontracted negated form of can is written as a single word cannot.) On inversion of
subject and verb (such as in questions; see below), the subject may be placed after a contracted
negated form: Should he not pay? or Shouldn't he pay?
Other elements, such as noun phrases, adjectives, adverbs, infinitive and participial phrases,
etc., can be negated by placing the word not before them: not the right answer, not
interesting, not to enter, not noticing the train, etc.
When other negating words such as never, nobody, etc. appear in a sentence, the
negating not is omitted (unlike its equivalents in many languages): I saw nothing or I didn't see
anything, but not (except in non-standard speech) *I didn't see nothing (see Double negative).
Such negating words generally have corresponding negative polarity
items (ever for never, anybody for nobody, etc.) which can appear in a negative context, but are
not negative themselves (and can thus be used after a negation without giving rise to double
negatives).

Clause and sentence structure[edit]

Main article: English clause syntax

A typical sentence contains one independent clause and possibly one or more dependent
clauses, although it is also possible to link together sentences of this form into longer sentences,
using coordinating conjunctions (see above). A clause typically contains a subject (a noun
phrase) and a predicate (a verb phrase in the terminology used above; that is, a verb together
with its objects and complements). A dependent clause also normally contains a subordinating
conjunction (or in the case of relative clauses, a relative pronoun or phrase containing one).

Word order[edit]
English word order has moved from the Germanic verb-second (V2) word order to being almost
exclusively subject–verb–object (SVO). The combination of SVO order and use of auxiliary
verbs often creates clusters of two or more verbs at the centre of the sentence, such as he had
hoped to try to open it. In most sentences English only marks grammatical relations through
word order. The subject constituent precedes the verb and the object constituent follows it.
The Object–subject–verb (OSV) may on occasion be seen in English, usually in the future
tense or used as a contrast with the conjunction "but", such as in the following examples: "Rome
I shall see!", "I hate oranges, but apples I'll eat!".[35]

Questions[edit]
Like many other Western European languages, English historically allowed questions to be
formed by inverting the positions of verb and subject. Modern English permits this only in the
case of a small class of verbs ("special verbs"), consisting of auxiliaries as well as forms of
the copula be (see subject–auxiliary inversion). To form a question from a sentence which does
not have such an auxiliary or copula present, the auxiliary verb do (does, did) needs to be
inserted, along with inversion of the word order, to form a question (see do-support). For
example:

 She can dance. → Can she dance? (inversion of subject she and auxiliary can)
 I am sitting here. → Am I sitting here? (inversion of subject I and copula am)
 The milk goes in the fridge. → Does the milk go in the fridge? (no special verb present; do-
support required)
The above concerns yes-no questions, but inversion also takes place in the same way after
other questions, formed with interrogative words such as where, what, how, etc. An exception
applies when the interrogative word is the subject or part of the subject, in which case there is
no inversion. For example:

 I go. → Where do I go? (wh-question formed using inversion, with do-support required in this
case)
 He goes. → Who goes? (no inversion, because the question word who is the subject)
Note that inversion does not apply in indirect questions: I wonder where he is (not *... where is
he). Indirect yes-no questions can be expressed using if or whether as the interrogative
word: Ask them whether/if they saw him.
Negative questions are formed similarly; however if the verb undergoing inversion has
a contraction with not, then it is possible to invert the subject with this contraction as a whole.
For example:

 John is going. (affirmative)

 John is not going. / John isn't going. (negative, with and without contraction)
 Isn't John going? / Is John not going? (negative question, with and without contraction
respectively)
See also English auxiliaries and contractions § Contractions and inversion.

Dependent clauses[edit]
The syntax of a dependent clause is generally the same as that of an independent clause,
except that the dependent clause usually begins with a subordinating conjunction or relative
pronoun (or phrase containing such). In some situations (as already described) the conjunction
or relative pronoun that can be omitted. Another type of dependent clause with no subordinating
conjunction is the conditional clause formed by inversion (see below).

Other uses of inversion[edit]

The clause structure with inverted subject and verb, used to form questions as described above,
is also used in certain types of declarative sentence. This occurs mainly when the sentence
begins with an adverbial or other phrase that is essentially negative or contains words such
as only, hardly, etc.: Never have I known someone so stupid; Only in France can such food be
tasted.
In elliptical sentences (see below), inversion takes place after so (meaning "also") as well as
after the negative neither: so do I, neither does she.
Inversion can also be used to form conditional clauses, beginning
with should, were (subjunctive), or had, in the following ways:

 should I win the race (equivalent to if I win the race);

 were he a soldier (equivalent to if he were a soldier);
 were he to win the race (equivalent to if he were to win the race, i.e. if he won the race);
 had he won the race (equivalent to if he had won the race).
Other similar forms sometimes appear, but are less common. There is also a construction with
subjunctive be, as in be he alive or dead (meaning "no matter whether he is alive or dead").
Use of inversion to express a third-person imperative is now mostly confined to the
expression long live X, meaning "let X live long".

Imperatives[edit]
In an imperative sentence (one giving an order), there is usually no subject in the independent
clause: Go away until I call you. It is possible, however, to include you as the subject for
emphasis: You stay away from me.

Elliptical constructions[edit]
Many types of elliptical construction are possible in English, resulting in sentences that omit
certain redundant elements. Various examples are given in the article on Ellipsis.
Some notable elliptical forms found in English include:

 Short statements of the form I can, he isn't, we mustn't. Here the verb phrase (understood
from the context) is reduced to a single auxiliary or other "special" verb, negated if
appropriate. If there is no special verb in the original verb phrase, it is replaced
by do/does/did: he does, they didn't.
 Clauses that omit the verb, in particular those like me too, nor me, me neither. The latter
forms are used after negative statements. (Equivalents including the verb: I do too or so do
I; I don't either or neither do I.)
 Tag questions, formed with a special verb and pronoun subject: isn't it?; were there?; am I
not?

History of English grammars[edit]

Main article: History of English grammars

The first published English grammar was a Pamphlet for Grammar of 1586, written by William
Bullokar with the stated goal of demonstrating that English was just as rule-based as Latin.
Bullokar's grammar was faithfully modeled on William Lily's Latin grammar, Rudimenta
Grammatices (1534), used in English schools at that time, having been "prescribed" for them in
1542 by Henry VIII. Bullokar wrote his grammar in English and used a "reformed spelling
system" of his own invention; but many English grammars, for much of the century after
Bullokar's effort, were written in Latin, especially by authors who were aiming to be
scholarly. John Wallis's Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae (1685) was the last English grammar
written in Latin.
Even as late as the early 19th century, Lindley Murray, the author of one of the most widely used
grammars of the day, was having to cite "grammatical authorities" to bolster the claim that
grammatical cases in English are different from those in Ancient Greek or Latin.
 English parts of speech are based on Latin and Greek parts of speech.[36] Some English
grammar rules were adopted from Latin, for example John Dryden is thought to have created the
rule no sentences can end in a preposition because Latin cannot end sentences in prepositions.
The rule of no split infinitives was adopted from Latin because Latin has no split infinitives.[37][38][39]

Grammar is:

1. the systematic study and description of a language. (Compare with usage.)

2. a set of rules and examples dealing with the syntax and word structures
(morphology) of a language. Adjective: grammatical.

Types of Grammar

 Case Grammar
 Cognitive Grammar
 Comparative Grammar
 Construction Grammar
 Descriptive and Prescriptive Grammar
 Generative Grammar
 Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG)
 Lexicogrammar
 Mental Grammar

 Pedagogical Grammar
 Reference Grammar
 Theoretical Grammar
 Traditional Grammar
 Transformational Grammar
 Universal Grammar
 Word Grammar

Etymology
From the Greek, "craft of letters"

Observations

 "One of the most fundamental claims of modern linguistic analysis is that

all languages have a grammar It could not be any other way. If a language
is spoken, it must have a phonetic and phonological system; since it has
words and sentences, it must also have a morphology and a syntax; and
since these words and sentences have systematic meanings, there must
obviously be semantic principles as well. Of course, these are the very
things that make up a grammar."
 (W. O'Grady and J. Archibald, Contemporary Linguistic Analysis: An
Introduction. Addison Wesley, 2000)
 "It is not the business of grammar, as some critics seem preposterously to
imagine, to give law to the fashions that regulate our speech. On the
contrary, from its conformity to these, and from that alone, it derives its
authority and value."
(George Campbell, Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1776)

 "Ancient attitudes to grammar still survive: many people are in awe of it,
know little about it, tend to fear or dislike it, often find it baffling or boring
if exposed to it at school, and yet a minority is fascinated by it: a field in
which precise scholarship and nit-picking pedantry have co-existed for
centuries."
(Sidney Greenbaum, The Oxford English Grammar. Oxford University
Press, 1996)

 "What I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure
of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence."(Joan Didion)
 "[G]rammar is the study of all the contrasts of meaning that it is possible
to make within sentences. The 'rules' of grammar tell us how. By one count,
there are some 3,500 such rules in English."
(David Crystal, The Fight for English. Oxford University Press, 2006)
 "A preschooler's tacit knowledge of grammar is more sophisticated than
the thickest style manual. [Grammar should not] be confused with the
guidelines for how one 'ought' to speak."
(Steven Pinker, Words and Rules. Harper, 1999)
 "The child does not learn his language from his grammar. After he has
learned it in other ways, grammar steps in and furnishes him a scientific
analysis of what he has been doing."
(Thomas R. Lounsbury, "Compulsory Composition in Colleges." Harper's
Monthly Magazine, Nov. 1911)

The Role of Grammar in the Teaching of Writing

"We would aim at a program embracing deep and wide knowledge

of grammar as highly useful, perhaps proclaiming that ignorance of grammar is
far more limiting than knowledge, that it creates a vacuum within which
dysfunctional prescriptive norms are enforced.

We would aim for a program that values home languages as the foundation for
the evolution of a highly effective writing voice. What our students know already
is much too deep to be taught, and we cannot afford to foster distrust. We need to
get down to the business of helping them put that fine instrument to work in the
creation of a range of effective texts, using a conscious understanding of language
as an important adjunct in that process." (Martha Kolln and Craig Hancock, "The
Story of English Grammar in United States Schools." English Teaching: Practice
and Critique, Dec. 2005)

Applications of Grammatical Study

"There are several applications of grammatical study: (1) A recognition of

grammatical structures is often essential for punctuation; (2) A study of one's
native grammar is helpful when one studies the grammar of a foreign language;
(3) A knowledge of grammar is a help in the interpretation of literary as well as
nonliterary texts, since the interpretation of a passage sometimes depends
crucially on grammatical analysis; (4) A study of the grammatical resources of
English is useful in composition: in particular, it can help you to evaluate the
choices available to you when you come to revise an earlier written draft." (Sidney
Greenbaum and Gerald Nelson, An Introduction to English Grammar, 2nd ed.

Pearson, 2002)

Syntax and Morphology

"Grammar is concerned with how sentences and utterances are formed. In a

typical English sentence, we can see the two most basic principles of grammar,
the arrangement of items (syntax) and the structure of items (morphology):

I gave my sister a sweater for her birthday.

The meaning of this sentence is obviously created by words such as gave, sister,
sweater and birthday. But there are other words (I, my, a, for, her) which
contribute to the meaning, and, additionally, aspects of individual words and the
way they are arranged which enable us to interpret what the sentence means."
(Ronald Carter and Michael McCarthy, Cambridge Grammar of English: A
Comprehensive Guide. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006)

Grammar and Conversation Analysis

"[G]rammar and social interaction are bound up together and analysis should
focus on the relationship between them, rather than separating grammar out as a
system that exists independently of language-in-interaction.

"For many linguists, such a position is counter-intuitive; but what is even more
counter-intuitive in the developing relationship between CA [conversation
analysis] and grammatical study is that contributors are starting to work with a
variety of definitions of 'grammar' in the first place. These range from the
traditional linguistic view of grammar as the set of rules for stringing words
together in sentences, to far less conventional and more sociologically inclined
ideas." (Ian Hutchby and Robin Wooffitt, Conversation Analysis, 2nd ed.

Polity, 2008)

Descriptive Grammar

 "This book [The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language] is a

description of the grammar of modern Standard English, providing a
detailed account of the principles governing the construction of English
words, phrases, clauses, and sentences. To be more specific, we give a
synchronic, descriptive grammar of general purpose, present-day,
international Standard English." (Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K.
Pullum, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge
Univ. Press, 2002)
 "Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely toward
correcting grammar." (Ferdinand de Saussure)

Thomas Jefferson on Grammatical Rigor

"When strictness of grammar does not weaken expression, it should be

attended to. . . . But where, by small grammatical negligences, the energy of an
idea is condensed, or a word stands for a sentence, I hold grammatical rigor in
contempt." (Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison, November 1804)

Lady Grammar

The perception that grammar is a sort of physical challenge has a long history. .
. . In the fifth century writings of Martianus Capella, which were central to the
medieval doctrine of the trivium, Lady Grammar was depicted carrying her
specialized tools in a box; the western entrance to Chartres Cathedral shows her
brandishing a bouquet of birch-rods. Grammar and trauma were closely
associated: knowledge was achieved through the sort of coercion that left marks."
(Henry Hitchings, The Language Wars. John Murray, 2011)

The Lighter Side of Grammar

First Day at the Grammar School

. . . and the black-gowned vulture at the front declared
"Today, boys, we are going to have
our first lesson in grammar!"

to which Eddie Williams, snotty-nosed, undaunted

in sempiternal wellies, answered back
"Ah, eh, sir, we already done grammer at ar other skewl!"
(Matt Simpson, Getting There. Liverpool University Press, 2001)

"People--they don't write anymore; they blog. Instead of talking, they text: no
punctuation, no grammar, 'lol' this and 'lmao' that. You know, it seems to me
that it's just a bunch of stupid people pseudo-communicating with a bunch of
other stupid people in a proto-language that resembles more what cavemen used
to speak than the King's English." (David Duchovny as Hank Moody in
"LOL." Californication, 2007)

"The truth is that grammar is not the most important thing in the world. The
Super Bowl is the most important thing in the world. But grammar is still
important. For example, suppose you are being interviewed for a job as an airline
pilot, and your prospective employer asks you if you have any experience, and
you answer: 'Well, I ain't never flied no actual airplanes or nothing, but I got
several pilot-style hats and several friends who I like to talk about airplanes with.'

"If you answer this way, the prospective employer will immediately realize that
you have ended your sentence with a preposition. . . ." (Dave Barry, "What Is and
Ain't Grammatical." Bad Habits: A 100% Fact-Free Book. Doubleday, 1985)

Pronunciation: GRAM-er

CITE

Definition

Case grammar is a linguistic theory that stresses the importance of semantic

roles in an effort to make explicit the basic meaning relationships in a sentence.

Case grammar was developed in the 1960s by American linguist Charles J.

Fillmore, who viewed it as a "substantive modification to the theory
of transformational grammar" ("The Case for Case," 1968).

In A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics (2008), David Crystal notes that

case grammar "came to attract somewhat less interest in the mid-1970s; but it
has proved to be influential on the terminology and classification of several later
theories, especially the theory of thematic roles."

See Examples and Observations below. Also see:

 Case
 Chomskyan Linguistics
  Generative Grammar
 Grammar
 Semantics
 Syntax
 Tagmemics
 Valency

Examples and Observations

 "In the late sixties I began to believe that certain kinds of groupings
of verbs and classifications of clause types could be stated more
meaningfully if the structures with which the verbs were initially associated
were described in terms of the semantic roles of their
associated arguments. I had become aware of certain American and
European work on dependency grammar and valence theory, and it seemed
clear to me that what was really important about a verb was its 'semantic
valence' (as one might call it), a description of the semantic role of its
arguments. . . . I proposed that verbs could be seen as basically having two
kinds of features relevant to their distribution in sentences: the first,
a deep-structurevalence description expressed in terms of what I called
'case frames,' the second a description in terms of rule features."
(Charles J. Fillmore, "A Private History of the Concept 'Frame.'" Concepts
of Case, ed. by René Dirven and Günter Radden. Gunter Narr Verlag, 1987)

 Semantic Roles and Relationships

"Case grammar . . . is primarily a reaction against the standard-theory
analysis of sentences, where notions such as subject, object, etc. are
neglected in favour of analyses in terms of NP, VP, etc. By focusing on
syntactic functions, however, it was felt that several important kinds of
semantic relationship could be represented, which it would otherwise be
difficult or impossible to capture. A set of sentences such as The key
opened the door, The door was opened by/with the key, The door opened,
The man opened the door with a key, etc., illustrate several 'stable'
semantic roles, despite the varying surface grammatical structures. In each
case the key is 'instrumental,' the door is the entity affected by the action,
and so on. Case grammar formalizes this insight using a model which
shows the influence of the predicate calculus of formal logic: the deep
structure of a sentence has two constituents, modality (features
of tense, mood, aspect and negation) and proposition (within which
the verb is considered central, and the various semantic roles that elements
of structure can have are listed with reference to it, and categorized as
 cases)."
(David Crystal, A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, 6th ed.
Blackwell, 2008)

 The Underlying Syntactic-Semantic Relationship

"[I]n a grammar which takes syntax as central, a case relationship will be
defined with respect to the framework of the organization of the whole
sentence from the start. Thus, the notion of case is intended to account for
functional, semantic, deep-structure relations between the verb and the
noun phrases associated with it, and not to account for surface-
form changes in nouns. Indeed, as is often the case in English, there may
not be any surface markers to indicate case, which is therefore a covert
category often only observable 'on the basis of selectional constraints and
transformational possibilities' (Fillmore, 1968, p. 3); they form 'a specific
finite set'; and 'observations made about them will turn out to have
considerable cross-linguistic validity' (p. 5).

"The term case is used to identify 'the underlying syntactic-semantic

relationship' which is universal:

the case notions comprise a set of universal, presumably innate concepts

which identify certain types of judgments human beings are capable of
making about the events that are going on around them, judgments about
such matters as who did it, who it happened to, and what got
changed.(Fillmore, 1968, p. 24)

The term case form identifies 'the expression of a case relationship in a

particular language' (p. 21). The notions of subject and predicate and of the
division between them should be seen as surface phenomena only; 'in its
basic structure [the sentence] consists of a verb and one or more noun
phrases, each associated with the verb in a particular case relationship' (p.
21). The various ways in which cases occur in simple sentences define
sentence types and verb types of a language (p. 21)."
(Kirsten Malmkjaer, "Case Grammar." The Linguistics Encyclopedia, ed.
by Kirsten Malmkjaer. Routledge, 1995)

 Contemporary Perspectives on Case Grammar

- "[C]ase-grammar is no longer seen by the majority of linguists working
within the general framework of transformational-generative grammar as a
viable alternative to the standard theory. The reason is that when it comes
to classifying the totality of the verbs in a language in terms of the deep-
structure cases that they govern, the semantic criteria which define these
 cases are all too often unclear or in conflict."
(John Lyons, Chomsky, 3rd ed. Fontana, 1997)

- "Case grammar was developed in the 1960s and is still favoured in

some quarters today, though most practical grammars of English pay little
attention to it."
(R.L. Trask, The Penguin Dictionary of English Grammar. Penguin, 2000)

Definition

Cognitive grammar is a usage-based approach to grammar that

emphasizes symbolic and semantic definitions of theoretical concepts that have
traditionally been analyzed as purely syntactic.

Cognitive grammar is associated with wider movements in contemporary

language studies, especially cognitive linguistics and functionalism.

The term cognitive grammar was introduced by American linguistRonald

Langacker in his two-volume study Foundations of Cognitive
Grammar (Stanford University Press, 1987/1991).

See the observations below. Also see:

 Cognitive Linguistics
 Construction Grammar
 Reflections on Grammar From 1776 to the Present

Observations

 "Portraying grammar as a purely formal system is not just wrong but

wrong-headed. I will argue, instead, that grammar is meaningful. This
is so in two respects. For one thing, the elements of grammar--
like vocabulary items--have meanings in their own right. Additionally,
grammar allows us to construct and symbolize the more elaborate
meanings of complex expressions (like phrases, clauses, and sentences). It
is thus an essential aspect of the conceptual apparatus through which we
apprehend and engage the world."
(Ronald W. Langacker, Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. Oxford
University Press, 2008)

 Symbolic Associations
"Cognitive grammar . . . chiefly departs from 'traditional' theories
of language in its contention that the way in which we produce and process
 language is determined not by the 'rules' of syntax but by the symbols
evoked by linguistic units. These linguistic units include morphemes,
words, phrases, clauses, sentences and whole texts, all of which are deemed
inherently symbolic in nature. The way in which we join linguistic units
together is also symbolic rather than rule-driven because grammar is itself
'meaningful' (Langacker 2008a: 4). In claiming a direct symbolic
association between linguistic form (what it terms 'phonological structure')
and semantic structure, Cognitive Grammar denies the need for an
organisational system to mediate between the phonological and semantic
structures (i.e. syntax)."
(Clara Neary, "Profiling the Flight of 'The Windhover.'" Cognitive
Grammar in Literature, ed. by Chloe Harrison et al. John Benjamins,
2014)

 Assumptions of Cognitive Grammar

"A Cognitive Grammar is based on the following assumptions . . .:
1. The grammar of a language is part of human cognition and interacts
with other cognitive faculties, especially with perception, attention,
and memory. . . .
2. The grammar of a language reflects and presents generalizations
about phenomena in the world as its speakers experience them. . . .
3. Forms of grammar are, like lexical items, meaningful and never
'empty' or meaningless, as often assumed in purely structural models
of grammar.
4. The grammar of a language represents the whole of a native
speaker's knowledge of both the lexical categories and the
grammatical structures of her language.
5. The grammar of a language is usage-based in that it provides
speakers with a variety of structural options to present their view of a
given scene."

(G. Radden and R. Dirven, Cognitive English Grammar. John Benjamins,

2007)

 Langacker's Four Principles

"A primary commitment of Cognitive Grammar is . . . to provide an optimal
set of constructs for explicitly describing linguistic structure. Its
formulation has been guided throughout by a number of principles thought
to be helpful in achieving such optimality. The first principle . . . is that
functional considerations should inform the process from the outset and be
reflected in the framework's architecture and descriptive apparatus.
Because the functions of language involve the manipulation and
symbolization of conceptual structures, a second principle is the need to
 characterize such structures at a reasonable level of explicit detail and
technical precision. To be revealing, however, descriptions must be natural
and appropriate. Thus, a third principle is that language and languages
have to be described in their own terms, without the imposition of artificial
boundaries or Procrustean modes of analysis based on conventional
wisdom. As a corollary, formalization is not to be considered an end in
itself, but must rather be assessed for its utility at a given stage of
investigation. That no attempt has yet been made to formalize Cognitive
Grammar reflects the judgment that the cost of the requisite
simplifications and distortions would greatly outweigh any putative
benefits. Finally, a fourth principle is that claims about language should be
broadly compatible with secure findings of related disciplines (e.g.,
cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology).
Nevertheless, the claims and descriptions of Cognitive Grammar are all
supported by specifically linguistic considerations."
(Ronald W. Langacker, "Cognitive Grammar." The Oxford Handbook of
Cognitive Linguistics, ed. by Dirk Geeraerts and Herbert Cuyckens. Oxford
University Press, 2007)

Definition

Comparative grammar is the branch of linguistics primarily concerned with the

analysis and comparison of the grammatical structures of
related languages or dialects.

The term comparative grammar was commonly used by 19th-

century philologists. However, Ferdinand de Saussure regarded comparative
grammar as "a misnomer for several reasons, the most troublesome of which is
that it implies the existence of a scientific grammar other than that which draws
on the comparison of languages" (Course in General Linguistics, 1916).

In the modern era, notes Sanjay Jain et al., "the branch of linguistics known as
'comparative grammar' is the attempt to characterize the class of (biologically
possible) natural languages through formal specification of their grammars; and
a theory of comparative grammar is such a specification of some definite
collection. Contemporary theories of comparative grammar begin with Chomsky .
. . , but there are several different proposals currently under investigation"
(Systems That Learn: An Introduction to Learning Theory, 1999).

See the observations below. Also see:

 Historical Linguistics
 Language Change
 Linguistic Typology
  Ten Types of Grammar

Observations

 "If we would understand the origin and real nature of grammatical forms,
and of the relations which they represent, we must compare them with
similar forms in kindred dialects and languages . . ..

"[The task of the comparative grammarian] is to compare the

grammatical forms and usages of an allied group of tongues and thereby
reduce them to their earliest forms and senses."
("Grammar," Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1911)

 Comparative Grammar--Past and Present

"Contemporary work in comparative grammar, like the comparative
work carried out by nineteenth-century grammarians, is concerned with
establishing [an] explanatory basis for the relationships between
languages. The work of the nineteenth century focused on relationships
between languages and groups of languages primarily in terms of a
common ancestry. It assumed a view of linguistic change as by and large
systematic and lawful (rule governed) and, on the basis of this assumption,
attempted to explain the relationship between languages in terms of a
common ancestor (often a hypothetical one for which there was no actual
evidence in the historical record). Contemporary comparative grammar, in
contrast, is significantly broader in scope. It is concerned with a theory of
grammar that is postulated to be an innate component of the human
mind/brain, a faculty of language that provides an explanatory basis for
how a human being can acquire a first language (in fact, any human
language he or she is exposed to). In this way, the theory of grammar is a
theory of human language and hence establishes the relationship among all
languages--not just those that happen to be related by historical accident
(for instance, via common ancestry)."
(Robert Freidin, Principles and Parameters in Comparative Grammar.
MIT, 1991)

Definition

In linguistics, construction grammar refers to any of the various approaches

to language study that emphasize the role of grammaticalconstructions--that is,
conventional pairings of form and meaning. Some of the different versions of
construction grammar are considered below.

Construction grammar is a theory of linguistic knowledge. "Instead of assuming a

clear-cut division of lexiconand syntax," note Hoffmann and Trousdale,
"Construction Grammarians consider all constructions to be part of a lexicon-
syntax continuum (a 'construction')" (Oxford Handbook of Construction
Grammar, 2013).

See Examples and Observations below. Also see:

 Agent and Patient

 Argument (Linguistics)
 Categorial Grammar
 Cognitive Grammar and Cognitive Linguistics
 Functionalism
 Phrase Structure Grammar
 Presentational Construction
 Relational Grammar
 Word Grammar

Examples and Observations

 "There are several different versions of 'Construction Grammar,' and

my account . . . will describe, quite informally, what they have in common.
The common idea is that a speaker's knowledge of his language consists of
a very large inventory of constructions, where a construction is understood
to be of any size and abstractness, from a single word to some grammatical
aspect of a sentence, such as its Subject-Predicate structure. Construction
Grammar emphasizes that there is a 'lexicon-syntax continuum,' contrary
to traditional views in which the lexicon and the syntactic rules are held to
be separate components of a grammar. The central motive of Construction
Grammar theorists is to account for the extraordinary productivity of
human languages, while at the same time recognizing the huge amount of
idiosyncratic grammatical data that humans acquire and store. 'The
constructionist approach to grammar offers a way out of the
lumper/splitter dilemma' (Goldberg 2006, p. 45). The key point is that
storage of idiosyncratic facts is compatible with deploying these facts
productively to generate novel expressions."
(James R. Hurford, The Origins of Grammar: Language in the Light of
Evolution. Oxford University Press, 2012)
 Constructional Meaning
"Crucially, construction grammars are not derivational. So for
example, the active and passive forms of a sentence are regarded as having
different conceptual structures rather than one being a transformation of
the other. Since construction grammars depend on the conceptual meaning
in context, they can be seen as approaches to linguistics that collapse the
classical distinctions between semantics, syntax and pragmatics. The
construction is the unit of language, which cuts across these other aspects.
So, for example, in They laughed him out of the room, the
normally intransitive verb receives a transitivereading and the situation
can be interpreted on the basis of the 'X cause Y to move' construction
rather than the sytanctic deviance alone. As a result, construction
grammars are proving most useful in understanding language
acquisition and are being used for second-language teaching, since it is the
meaningfulness of the situation which is of primary importance, and
syntax and semantics are treated holistically."
(R.L. Trask, Language and Linguistics: The Key Concepts, 2nd ed., edited
by Peter Stockwell. Routledge, 2007)

 Different Versions of Construction Grammar

"Any grammatical theory can be described as offering models of
representation of the structure of an utterance, and models of organization
of the relationship between utterance structures (presumably, in a
speaker's mind). The latter are sometimes described in terms of levels of
representation, linked by derivational rules. But construction
grammar is a nonderivational model (like, for instance, Head-driven
Phrase Structure Grammar), and so a more general description of this
aspect of grammatical theory is 'organization.'

"Different versions of construction grammar will be briefly outlined . . ..

We survey four variants of construction grammar found in cognitive
linguistics--Construction Grammar (in capital letters; Kay and Fillmore
1999; Kay et al. in prep.), the construction grammar of Lakoff (1987) and
Goldberg (1995), Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1987, 1991) and Radical
Construction Grammar (Croft 2001)--and focus on the distinctive
characteristics of each theory. . . .

"It should be noted that the different theories tend to focus on different
issues, representing their distinctive positions vis–à–vis the other theories.
For example, Construction Grammar explores syntactic relations and
inheritance in detail; the Lakoff/Goldberg model focuses more on
categorization relations between constructions; Cognitive Grammar
focuses on semantic categories and relations; and Radical Construction
 Grammar focuses on syntactic categories and typological universals.
Finally, the last three theories all endorse the usage-based model . . .."
(William Croft and D. Alan Cruse, Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge
University Press, 2004)

 Background of Construction Grammar

- "One of the central concepts of linguistics is the Saussurean notion of the
linguistic sign as an arbitrary and conventional pairing of form (or sound
pattern/signifiant) and meaning (or mental concept/signife; cf., e.g., de
Saussure [1916] 2006: 65-70). Under this view, the German sign Apfel and
its Hungarian equivalent alma have the same underlying meaning 'apple,'
but different associated conventional forms . . .. Over 70 years after
Saussure's death, several linguists then explicitly started to explore the idea
that arbitrary form-meaning pairings might not only be a useful concept
for describing wordsor morphemes but that perhaps all levels of
grammatical description involve such conventionalized form-meaning
pairings. This extended notion of the Saussurean sign has become known
as 'construction' (which includes morphemes, words, idioms, and
abstract phrasal patterns) and the various linguistic approaches exploring
this idea were labeled 'Construction Grammar.'"
(Thomas Hoffmann and Graeme Trousdale, "Construction Grammar: An
Introduction." The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. Oxford
University Press, 2013)

- "[T]he approach to language which has its basis in the theorizing of

Charles Fillmore and his students and colleagues at the University of
California at Berkeley in the early 1980s . . . has come to be known
as Construction Grammar (for a comprehensive overview of the
theory, the reader is referred to Fried and Östman 2004). . . .

"[One] precursor to Construction Grammar is a model that was also

developed at the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1970s,
within the tradition of Generative Semantics. This was the work of George
Lakoff and informally known as Gestalt Grammar (Lakoff 1977). Lakoff's
'experiential' approach to syntax was based on the view that the
grammatical function of a sentence constituent holds only in relation to a
particular sentence type as a whole. Specific constellations of relations such
as Subject and Object thus constituted complex patterns, or 'gestalts.' . . .
Lakoff's (1977: 246-247) list of 15 characteristics of linguistic gestalts
contains many of the features that have become definitional criteria of
constructions in Construction Grammar, including, for example, the
formulation that 'Gestalts are at once holistic and analyzable. They have
parts, but the wholes are not reducible to the parts.'"
 (Jan-Ola Östman and Mirjam Fried, "Historical and Intellectual
Background of Construction Grammar." Construction Grammar in a
Cross-Language Perspective. John Benjamins, 2004)

Definition

In linguistics, lexical-functional grammar is a model of grammar that provides a

framework for examining both morphological structures and syntactic structures.
Also known as psychologically realistic grammar.

David W. Carroll notes that the "major significance of lexical-functional grammar

is the shunting of most of the explanatory burden onto the lexicon and away
from transformational rules" (Psychology of Language, 2008).

The first collection of papers on the theory of lexical-functional grammar (LFG)--

Joan Bresnan's The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations--was
published in 1982. In the years since, notes Mary Dalrymple, "the growing body
of work within the LFG framework has shown the advantages of an explicitly
formulated, non-transformational approach to syntax, and the influence of this
theory has been extensive" (Formal Issues in Lexical-Functional Grammar).

See Examples and Observations below. Also see:

 Lexicogrammar
 Argument (Linguistics)
 Constituency
 Generative Grammar and Transformational Grammar
 Grammatical Function
 Lexicon and Lexis
 Morphology
 Phrase Structure Grammar
 Relational Grammar
 Ten Types of Grammar
 Word Grammar

Examples and Observations

 "In LFG, the structure of a sentence consists of two distinct formal

objects: C[onstituent]-structure of the familiar kind plus a functional
structure (or F-structure) which displays certain additional kinds of
information. Most important in the F-structure is the labeling of
grammatical relations like subjectand object (these are called grammatical
 functions in LFG).

"The first part of the name reflects the fact that a great deal of work is done
by the lexical entries, the 'dictionary' part of the framework. Lexical entries
are usually rich and elaborate, and each one inflected from a lexical item
(such as write, writes, wrote, written and writing) has its own lexical
entry. Lexical entries are responsible for dealing with many relations and
processes handled by different machinery in other frameworks; an example
is the voice contrast between actives and passives."
(Robert Lawrence Trask and Peter Stockwell, Language and Linguistics:
The Key Concepts, 2nd ed. Routledge, 2007)

 Different Kinds of Structures

"A natural language utterance is rich in structures of different kinds:
sounds form recurring patterns and morphemes, words form phrases,
grammatical functions emerge from morphological and phrasal structure,
and patterns of phrases evoke a complex meaning. These structures are
distinct but related; each structure contributes to and constrains the
structure of other kinds of information. Linear precedence and phrasal
organization are related both to the morphological structure of words and
to the functional organization of sentences. And the functional structure of
a sentence--relations like subject-of, object-of, modifier-of, and so on--is
crucial to determining what the sentence means.

"Isolating and defining these structures and the relations between them is
a central task of linguistics. . . .

"Lexical Functional Grammar recognizes two different kinds of

syntactic structures: the outer, visible hierarchical organization of words
into phrases, and the inner, more abstract hierarchical organization of
grammatical functions into complex functional structures. Languages vary
greatly in the phrasal organization they allow, and in the order and means
by which grammatical functions are realized. Word order may be more or
less constrained, or almost completely free. In contrast the more abstract
functional organization of languages varies comparatively little: languages
with widely divergent phrasal organization nevertheless
exhibit subject, object, and modifier properties that have been well-studied
by traditional grammarians for centuries."
(Mary Dalrymple, John Lamping, Fernando Pereira, and Vijay Saraswat,
"Overview and Introduction." Semantics and Syntax in Lexical Functional
Grammar: The Resource Logic Approach, ed. by Mary Dalrymple. The
 MIT Press, 1999)

 C(onstituent)-Structure and F(unctional) Structure

"LFG contains multiple parallel structures each modeling a different
aspect of linguistic structure. The main syntactic structures are
(c)onstituent-structure and f(unctional) structure . . ..

"C-structure models the 'surface' syntactic form of language: it is here that

surface precedence and dominance relations are encoded. C-structures are
phrase-structure trees, characterized by a particular form of X' theory . . .
designed to accommodate the large amount of phrase structure variation
found cross-linguistically, from the relatively strict configurationality of
languages like English to the more radically non-configurational languages
of Australia. . . .

"C-structures are always base-generated; there is no movement. . . . [T]he

effect of movement is achieved by the fact that different c-structure
positions can be mapped into the same f-structure via unification.

"The level of f-structure models grammatical relations. Unlike c-structures,

which are phrase structure keys, f-structures are attribute-value matrices.
F-structure attributes may be grammatical functions
(e.g. SUBJ, OBJ, COMP, also nonargument functions TOP(IC),
FOC(US)), tense/aspect/mood categories (e.g. TENSE), functional nominal
categories (e.g. CASE, NUM, GEND), or the predicate (semantic) attribute
PRED. . . . The contents of f-structure come from the lexical items of the
sentences themselves, or annotations on the nodes of the c-structure
linking pieces of c-structure to parts of the f-structure."
(Rachel Nordlinger and Joan Bresnan, "Lexical-Functional Grammar:
Interactions Between Morphology and Syntax." Non-Transformational
Syntax: Formal and Explicit Models of Grammar, ed. by Robert D.
Borsley and Kersti Börjars. Blackwell, 2011)

Alternate Spellings: Lexical-Functional Grammar (capitalized)

Formal and informal language

from English Grammar Today
We use formal language in situations that are serious or that involve people we don’t
know well. Informal language is more commonly used in situations that are more
relaxed and involve people we know well.

Formal language is more common when we write; informal language is more common
when we speak. However, there are times where writing can be very informal, for
example, when writing postcards or letters to friends, emails or text messages. There
are also examples where spoken English can be very formal, for example, in a speech
or a lecture. Most uses of English are neutral; that is, they are neither formal nor
informal.

Formal language and informal language are associated with particular choices of
grammar and vocabulary.

Contractions, relative clauses without a relative pronoun and ellipsis are more common
in informal language.

Compare

She has decided to accept the job. formal

She’s decided to accept the job. informal: She’s = contraction

Compare

The girl whom I met in Singapore was

formal
interested in working in Australia.

The girl I met in Singapore was interested informal: relative clause without the
in working in Australia. relative pronoun whom

Compare

We went to Barcelona for the weekend.

Formal
We have a lot of things to tell you.
Went to Barcelona for the weekend. Lots Informal: ellipsis (more likely to be
to tell you. written or texted than spoken)

More formal vocabulary commonly involves longer words or words with origins in Latin
and Greek. More informal vocabulary commonly involves shorter words, or words with
origins in Anglo-Saxon. Most dictionaries indicate very informal and/or formal words.

formal informal

commence start

terminate end

endeavour try

We often choose to use certain modal verbs to be more formal and polite:

Can I suggest you try this new model? (neutral)

May I suggest you try this new model? (more formal)

Might I suggest you try this new model? (very formal)

Basic sentence structure

Jonny / April 23, 2014

For English speakers, as well as speakers of most European languages would know that the sentence structure of
those languages is mainly.

Subject – Verb – Object

I (Subject) am (verb) a man (object).
In Tagalog however, one needs to become accustomed to the structure when he/she practises the language. The
sentence structure is not unique however strange to native English speakers. These are the most common structures
in Tagalog:

Verb – Subject – Object OR Verb – Object – Subject

As you can see, the verb goes before either the object or the subject. This form is common in speech. Let’s analyse
some examples:

Lalaki (male) si Juan ==> Juan is male

NOTE: There is no “to be” word but we’ll discuss this later. Here are some examples with verbs.
Kumain (ate) ang aso (dog) ng buto (bone) ==> The dog ate a bone.
Nakita (saw) ko (I) siya (him/her) ==> I saw him/her.
Subject – Verb – Object
This is another structure common in the language where the subject goes before the verb. Usually, this form is
considered formal.

Si Juan ay lalaki ==> Juan is male

Notice that unlike the VSO example (Lalaki si Juan), the SVO example has the word “ay” between the subject and
the object. Ay is a particle in a sentence that can be used as either a copula, linking verb, “to be” verb or an equal
sign. Some sources may say that the particle is not a copula or a linking verb but like the “=”. If it makes things easy
for you, you can try using it as the verb “to be” in SVO sentences. One of the reasons why the particle is not
considered a verb because it can be in a sentence with other verbs. Ayis also not considered an auxiliary verb.
Ang aso ay kumain ng buto ==> The dog ate a bone.
As a native Tagalog speaker, I would say both. Before I further explain my answer, I
have to first mention the structure of Tagalog language to make it clear.

Most languages are classified as SVO or SOV in structure. This is basically because
subjects of the sentence come first before either the verb or the object. Tagalog is
different as verbs commonly comes first then either the object or the actor. Take note
that I said “actor” and not “subject”. In Tagalog, every word that will follow direct
markers like “ang” or “si” is always the subject. That means the object of the sentence
can also be the “subject” of the sentence. Kinda confused?

Well. Tagalog is actually a topic-comment language and not a subject-predicate

language. It means that a word can be both the “subject” (or topic) of the sentence and
the “object” at the same time unlike the usual Indo-European structure where the
subject is just the subject and the object is the object.

When a Tagalog sentence has a topic (a noun of course) and a comment that is either a
noun or an adjective, its structure can easily be seen as:

noun comment + noun topic (or)

adjective comment + noun topic

Take note that these are the common structure for Tagalog syntax, comment first, topic
next.

These are what most people will consider as the English equivalent of
subject + linking verb + noun (or)

subject + linking verb + adjective

Examples:

Babae ang anak niya. - Her child is a girl.

Maganda siya. - She is beautiful.

When a verb comes on the way, it will be structured differently in Tagalog as there will
be an action and if any, an object.

verb comment + noun topic (no object)

verb comment + noun object + noun actor (actor triggered)

verb comment + noun actor + noun object (object triggered)

Again, this is the default syntax of Tagalog.

These will be equivalent to the English structure for a sentence with a verb.

subject + intransitive verb

subject + transitive verb + object

Examples:

Natulog ang bata. - The child slept.

Kumuha ng lapis ang bata. - The child takes a pencil.

Kinuha ng bata ang lapis. - The pencil is taken by the child.

So the explanation to my answer:

In the second sentence above, “lapis” is the object in indirect focus while “bata” is the
actor in direct focus. In the third sentence, “bata” is the actor in indirect focus while
“lapis” is the object in direct focus. In the English translation, “pencil” which is the
object in the first sentence became the subject of the second sentence. In Tagalog,
however, even if “lapis” turned to be in the direct case and became the topic of the
sentence, it is still the object of the verb. Thus, the 2nd sentence is in VOS while the 3rd
sentence is in VSO.

Take note that the noun with “ng” usually comes first before the one with “ang” which is
the topic (or roughly what is considered as the subject”). This is because the indirect
marker “ng” is actually similar to the modifier marker “ng”. Switching the two will make
a confusion as to what is the actual purpose of the marker “ng”.
Kumuha ng lapis ang bata. - Kumuha ang bata ng lapis.

Kinuha ng bata ang lapis. - Kinuha ang lapis ng bata.

In the first example, switching the object and the actor created no confusion as there can
be no such thing as “the child of a pencil”. But in the second, “ng bata” can be confused
as a modifier to “ang lapis” because it is next to it. The sentence now actually translates
to

The pencil of the child was taken.

which makes sense.

Now, to answer the question, why Wikipedia confidently describes Tagalog as VSO? The
answer is from the fact that when a sentence has an object, by default, the object should
be the topic of the sentence to emphasize it (unless it’s not the motive of your sentence).
This is also the reason why Tagalog seems to construct sentences in the passive voice
when there is an object. If the object should be the topic, the verb should be in object
trigger, and the actor, well, in the indirect case. As noted above, indirect-cased nouns
should comes first before direct-cased ones for it to not be confused as a modifier thus
making it V-S-O in structure.

Other reason is common sense. As in the examples below, switching the actor and the
object while in actor focus commonly makes no sense to interpret the object as just a
modifier.

VOS - VSO

Kumuha ng lapis ang bata. - Kumuha ang bata ng lapis.

Magtatanim ng kamote si Tatay. - Magtatanim si Tatay ng kamote.

We can never interpret the two sentences as

The child of a pencil took (what?).

Father of sweet potato will plant (what?).

This makes the structure V-S-O the common structure for Tagalog. Unlike in object-
triggered sentences, switching the actor and the object makes confusion.

Dinala ng lalaki ang bulaklak. - Dinala ang bulaklak ng lalaki.

The flower was brought by the man. - The flower of the man was brought.

Another,
Kinakain ng mga ibon ang mga buto. - Kinakain ang mga buto ng mga ibon.

The seeds are eated by the birds. - The bones(?) of the birds are eaten.

Therefore, VOS is commonly used only for actor-triggered sentences while VSO can be
used in both cases. As mentioned earlier, object-triggered sentences are more common
so that makes 2 points for VSO.

Grammatical meaning is the meaning conveyed in a sentence by word order and

other grammatical signals. Also called structural meaning. Linguists distinguish
grammatical meaning from lexical meaning (or denotation)--that is,
the dictionarymeaning of an individual word. Walter Hirtle notes that "a word
expressing the same idea can fulfill different syntactic functions. The
grammatical difference between the throw in to throw a ball and that in a good
throw has long been attributed to a difference of meaning not of the lexical type
described in dictionaries, but of the more abstract, formal type described in
grammars" (Making Sense out of Meaning, 2013).

Grammatical Meaning in English

 Dummy It
 Existential There
 Grammaticalization
 Lexicogrammar
 Quantifier Floating
 Syntax
 What Is Grammar?

Grammatical Meaning and Structure

 "Words grouped together randomly have little meaning on their own,

unless it occurs accidentally. For example, each of the following words has
lexical meaning at the word level, as is shown in a dictionary, but they
convey no grammatical meaning as a group:

a. [without grammatical meaning]Lights the leap him before the down hill
purple.

However when a special order is given to these words, grammatical

meaningis created because of the relationships they have to one another.

a. [with grammatical meaning]"The purple lights leap down the hill before
him."
 (Bernard O'Dwyer, Modern English Structures: Form, Function and
Position. Broadview Press, 2006)

Number and Tense

 "Different forms of the same lexeme will generally, though not necessarily,
differ in meaning: they will share the same lexical meaning (or meanings)
but differ in respect of their grammatical meaning, in that one is
the singular form (of a noun of a particular subclass) and the other is
the plural form (of a noun of a particular subclass); and the difference
between singular and plural forms, or--to take another example--the
difference between the past, present and future forms of verbs, is
semantically relevant: it affects sentence-meaning. The meaning of a
sentence . . . is determined partly by the meaning of the words (i.e.,
lexemes) of which it is composed and partly by its grammatical meaning."
(John Lyons, Linguistic Semantics: An Introduction. Cambridge
University Press, 1996)

Word Class and Grammatical Meaning

 "Note . . . how word class can make a difference to meaning. Consider the
following:

He brushed his muddy shoes. [verb]

He gave his muddy shoes a brush. [noun]

Changing from the construction with a verb to one with a noun involves more
than just a change of word class in these sentences.

There is also a modification of meaning. The verb emphasizes the activity and
there is a greater implication that the shoes will end up clean, but the noun
suggests that the activity was much shorter, more cursory and performed with
little interest, so the shoes were not cleaned properly.

 "Now compare the following:

Next summer I am going to Spain for my holidays. [adverb]

Next summer will be wonderful. [noun]

According to traditional grammar, next summer in the first sentence is

an adverbial phrase, while in the second it is a noun phrase. Once again, the
change of grammatical category also entails some change of meaning. The
adverbial phrase is an adjunct, a component bolted on to the rest of the sentence,
and merely provides the temporal context for the whole utterance. On the other
hand, use of the phrase as a noun in subject position renders it less
circumstantial and less abstract; it is now the theme of the utterance and a more
sharply delimited period in time." (Brian Mott, Introductory Semantics and
Pragmatics for Spanish Learners of English. Edicions Universitat Barcelona,
2009)

This is the simplest way I know how to explain the two:-

A lexical item (lexical word) is what we normally recognise as "the ordinary word." A
lexical item can also be a part of a word or a chain of words. Lexical items are the basic
building blocks of a language's vocabulary (its lexicon, in other words). I can do no
better in explaining this than the Wikipedia article: Lexical item.

 cat (single word)

 traffic light (words together meaning one thing)
 take care of (a verbal phrase)
 by the way (an idiomatic phrase)
 it's raining cats and dogs (a chain of words)
A grammatical word (a.k.a. function word) is a word that in itself has either (1) little
or no actual meaning (lexical meaning) or (2) ambiguous or uncertain meaning, BUT
functions to indicate grammatical relationships with other words in a sentence. The
usual grammatical words are:-

 auxiliaries (am, are, be, do, got, is, have, etc)

 conjunctions (and, although, or, that, when, while, etc)
 determiners (a, either, more, much, neither, my, that, the, etc)
 particles (as, no, nor, not, etc)
 prepositions (at, between, in, of, without, etc)
 pronouns (I, you, he, she, it, we, they, anybody, one, etc)
In other words, lexical words are the ordinary words to denote things whereas
grammatical words are the words that operate the grammar. There is clearly some
degree of overlap between the two.

Types of word meaning: lexical, grammatical meaning

It is more or less universally recognised

that word-meaning is not homogeneous but is made up of various components the
combination and the interrelation of which determine to a great extent the inner
facet of the word. These components are usually described as types of meaning.
The two main types of meaning that are readily observed are the grammatical and
the lexical meanings to be found in words and word-forms.

We notice, e.g., that word-forms, such as girls, winters, joys, tables,etc. though
denoting widely different objects of reality have something in common. This
common element is the grammatical meaning of plurality which can be found in all
of them.

Thus grammatical meaning may be defined, as the component of meaning

recurrent in identical sets of individual forms of different words, as, e.g., the tense
meaning in the word-forms of verbs (asked, thought, walked, etc.) or the case
meaning in the word-forms of various nouns (girl’s, boy’s, night’s, etc.).

In a broad sense it may be argued that linguists who make a distinction between
lexical and grammatical meaning are, in fact, making a distinction between the
functional (linguistic) meaning which operates at various levels as the interrelation
of various linguistic units and referential (conceptual) meaning as the interrelation
of linguistic units and referents (or concepts).

In modern linguistic science it is commonly held that some elements of

grammatical meaning can be identified by the position of the linguistic unit in
relation to other linguistic units, i.e. by its distribution. Word-forms speaks, reads,
writes have one and the same grammatical meaning as they can all be found in
identical distribution, e.g. only after the pronouns he, she, it and before adverbs
like well, badly, to-day, etc. It follows that a certain component of the meaning of a
word is described when you identify it as a part of speech, since different parts of
speech are distributionally different (cf. my work and I work).

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Comparing word-forms of one and the same word we observe that besides
grammatical meaning, there is another component of meaning to be found in them.
Unlike the grammatical meaning this component is identical in all the forms of the
word. Thus, e.g. the word-forms go, goes, went, going, gone possess different
grammatical meanings of tense, person and so on, but in each of these forms we
find one and the same semantic component denoting the process of movement.
This is the lexical meaning of the word which may be described as the
component of meaning proper to the word as a linguistic unit, i.e. recurrent in all
the forms of this word.

The difference between the lexical and the grammatical components of meaning is
not to be sought in the difference of the concepts underlying the two types of
meaning, but rather in the way they are conveyed. The concept of plurality, e.g.,
 may be expressed by the lexical meaning of the world plurality; it may also be
expressed in the forms of various words irrespective of their lexical meaning, e.g.
boys, girls, joys, etc. The concept of relation may be expressed by the lexical
meaning of the word relation and also by any of the prepositions, e.g. in, on,
behind, etc. (cf. the book is in/on, behind the table). “

It follows that by lexical meaning we designate the meaning proper to the given
linguistic unit in all its forms and distributions, while by grammatical meaning we
designate the meaning proper to sets of word-forms common to all words of a
certain class. Both the lexical and the grammatical meaning make up the word-
meaning as neither can exist without the other.

A SHORT OVERVIEW OF ENGLISH SYNTAX

Based on The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language

Rodney Huddleston
The University of Queensland

This paper presents a brief account of English syntax based on The Cambridge Grammar of the English
Language,[1] providing an overview of the main constructions and categories in the language. The present
version is intended primarily for members of the English Teachers' Association of Queensland (ETAQ),
offering an alternative approach to that presented in the 2007 volume of their journal Words`Worth by
Lenore Ferguson under the title `Grammar at the Coalface' - in particular the articles `The structural
basics' (March 2007) and `Functional elements in a clause' (June 2007). I make use of concepts
discussed in my own Words'Worth paper `Aspects of grammar: functions, complements and inflection'
(March 2008), and take over Functional Grammar's useful convention of distinguishing between functions
and classes by using an initial capital letter for the former: thus Subject is the name of a function, noun
phrase the name of a class.

1 SENTENCE AND CLAUSE

We distinguish two main types of sentence: a clausal sentence, which has the form of a single clause,
and a compound sentence, which has the form of two or more coordinated clauses, usually joined by
a coordinator(such as and, or, but):

[1] i Sue went to London last week. [clausal sentence]

ii Sue went to London last week and her father went with her. [compound sentence]

Note that such an example as We stayed at the hotel which you recommended is also a clausal sentence
even though it contains two clauses. This is because one clause, which you recommended, is part of the
other, rather than separate from it (more specifically, the which you recommended is part of the noun
phrase the hotel which you recommended); the larger clause is thus We stayed at the hotel which you
recommended, and this does constitute the whole sentence, like that in [i].
The fact that the two types of sentence are distinguished in terms of clauses implies that we take
the clause to be a more basic unit than the sentence, which reflects the fact that in speech it tends to be
more difficult to determine the boundaries between sentences than the boundaries between clauses. For
most of this overview we will focus on clauses: we return to coordination in Section14.

2 CANONICAL AND NON-CANONICAL CLAUSES

We can describe the structure of clauses most economically if we distinguish between the most basic and
elementary kinds of clause, which we call canonical clauses, and the rest. The idea is that we can
present the analysis more clearly if we begin with canonical clauses, describing them directly, and then
deal in turn with the various kinds of non-canonical clause, describing these indirectly, in terms of how
they differ from canonical clauses.
The following paired examples will give some idea of what is involved in this distinction:

[2] Canonical Non-canonical

i a. She has read your article. b. She hasn't read your article.
ii a. Sue is coming for dinner. b. Is Sue coming for dinner?
iii a. They knew the victim. b. She said that they knew the victim.
iv a. He missed the train. b. Either he missed the train or it is late.
v a. The secretary took the key. b. The key was taken by the secretary.

These illustrate the following properties of canonical clauses:

o They are positive; negative clauses like [ib] are non-canonical.
o They are declarative; interrogatives like [iib] are non-canonical, as are the other clause
types: imperatives (e.g. Please stand up) and exclamatives (What a fool I've been).
o They are main clauses; the underlined clause in [iiib] is subordinate and hence non-canonical.
o They are non-coordinate; the two underlined clauses in [ivb] are coordinated and hence each of
them is non-canonical.
o They are active; passive clauses like [vb] are non-canonical. This is a matter of information
packaging and we can say, more generally, that canonical clauses package the information in the
grammatically most basic way. Thus I have now read most of them is canonical but Most of them I
have now read is not.

There are two further points that should be made at this point.

(a) In all the above examples the non-canonical clauses differ in their structure from canonical clauses,
but this is not always so. In [iiib] the subordinate clause is introduced by that but we could omit this,
giving She said they knew the victim, where the underlined clause is identical with [iiia]; nevertheless it is
still subordinate and hence non-canonical. It is subordinate by virtue of being Complement of the
verb said, but the subordination happens not to be marked in the internal grammatical structure of the
clause itself.

(b) A clause is non-canonical if it lacks at least one of the above properties. It may of course lack more
than one of them. Thus Wasn't the key taken by the secretary? has three non-canonical properties: it is
negative, interrogative and passive. In the discussion below we will take the non-canonical properties in
turn with the understanding that they can combine.

3 INITIAL LISTING OF THE PARTS OF SPEECH

We distinguish nine primary word classes, or parts of speech, to use the traditional term. In this overview
we needn't worry about interjections (wow, ah, hello, and the like), which leaves us with eight classes.
They are named and exemplified in [3]:

[3] i Verb He is ill. She left early. We want to help.

ii Noun The dog barked. Sue won easily. I love you.
iii Adjective He's very young. I've got a sore knee. It looks easy.
iv Adverb She spoke clearly. You're extremely fit. He works very hard
v Determinative The dog barked. I've got a sore knee. We need some milk.
vi Preposition He's in the garden. It's from your uncle. We went to Paris.
vii Coordinator We saw Kim and Pat. Hurry or we'll be late. It's cheap but good.
viii Subordinator I know that it's true. Ask whether it's true. I wonder if it's true.
Note that we use `determinative' as the name of a class and `Determiner' as the name of a function; [2] we
need to invoke the class vs function distinction here to cater for the construction illustrated in the
doctor's car. Here the doctor's has the same function, Determiner, as the in the car, but it is not a word
and hence not a determinative: as far as its class is concerned it's a noun phrase.
The above scheme differs from that of traditional grammar in three respects:
o We take pronouns to be a subclass of nouns, not a distinct primary class.
o Traditional grammars generally take our determinatives to be a subclass of adjectives, though some
recognise a class of articles consisting of the and a. Our determinative class is much larger,
containing not just the and a, but also words like some, any, all, each, every, no, etc.; these are
very different from words like those underlined in [iii].
o We have coordinator and subordinator as distinct primary classes, whereas traditional grammar has
a primary class of conjunctions subdivided into coordinating and subordinating conjunctions.

4 PHRASES
For each of the first six of the word classes in [3] there is a corresponding class of phrases whose Head
belongs to that class. In the following examples, the phrase is enclosed in brackets and the Head
underlined:

[4] i Verb phrase She [wrote some letters]. He [is still in London].
ii Noun phrase [The new lodger] is here. [The boss] wants to see [you].
iii Adjective phrase It's getting [rather late]. I'm [glad you could come].
iv Adverb phrase I spoke [too soon]. It's [quite extraordinarily] good.
v Determinative phrase I saw [almost every] card. We've [very little] money left.
vi Preposition phrase They're [in the garden]. He wrote a book [on sharks].

5 THE STRUCTURE OF CANONICAL CLAUSES

5.1 Subject and Predicate
A canonical clause consists of a Subject followed by a Predicate. The Predicate is realised by a verb
phrase; the Subject is mostly realised by a noun phrase, but there are other possibilities too, most
importantly a subordinate clause:

[5] Subject Predicate

i One of his friends | called a doctor. [noun phrase as Subject]
ii That he was lying | was obvious. [subordinate clause as Subject]

In canonical clauses describing an action the Subject will be associated with the semantic role of actor, or
agent, as in [5i]. But many clauses don't express actions: we heard an explosion, for example, describes
a sensory experience, and here the Subject is associated with the role of experiencer. There are
numerous different kinds of semantic role that can be associated with the Subject: what the role is in a
particular instance will depend on the meaning of the clause, especially of the verb.
Meaning therefore does not provide a reliable way of identifying the Subject. But this function has a
good few distinctive grammatical properties which together generally make it easy to identify. Here are
some of them.

(a) Position. Its default position - the one it occupies unless there are special reasons for placing it
elsewhere - is before the Predicate.

(b) Formation of interrogatives. You can generally change a declarative clause into an interrogative by
inverting the Subject with the first auxiliary verb; if there is no auxiliary in the declarative you need to
insert the appropriate form of do.[3] In either case the Subject ends up following the auxiliary verb:

[6] Declarative Interrogative

i a. The boss is in her office. b. Is the boss in her office?
 ii a. Everyone signed the petition. b. Did everyone sign the petition?

(c) Interrogative tags. To seek confirmation of a statement you can add an interrogative tag, consisting of
an auxiliary verb and a personal pronoun Subject which relates back to the Subject of the clause to which
the tag is attached: The boss is in her office, isn't she?; Everyone signed the petition, didn't they?

(d) Subject-verb agreement, Where the verb has person-number properties (in the present tense and the
past tense of be), they are normally determined by agreement with the Subject:

[7] a. Her son plays the piano. b. Her sons play the piano.

5.2 Predicator, Complements and Adjuncts

At the next layer of structure below the Predicate we distinguish three functions. The Predicator is the
function filled by the verb. The verb is the Head of the verb phrase, and Predicator is the special term
used for the Head of the verb phrase forming the Predicate of a clause. Thus in [7b] play the piano is a
verb phrase functioning as Predicate while play is a verb functioning as Predicator.
Complement and Adjunct are different kinds of Dependent, distinguished by
the licensing condition. Complements can occur only if they are licensed by the Head verb: the verb
must belong to a subclass that permits (or requires) a Complement of the type in question. Adjuncts are
not subject to this restriction. Compare:

[8] I mowed the lawn before it started to rain.

Here the lawn is admissible because the verb mow (unlike disappear, for example) allows a Dependent
of this kind, so the lawn is a Complement. But a Dependent indicating time can occur with any verb,
so before it started to rain is an Adjunct.
We will look further at Complements in the next subsection. As for Adjuncts, they are usually
realised by adverb phrases, preposition phrases, subordinate clauses, or a very narrow range of noun
phrases. They can be divided into various semantic subtypes, such as Adjuncts of time, place, manner,
etc., as illustrated in [9]:

[9] i She spoke very clearly. [adverb phrase as Adjunct of manner]

ii As a result of his action, he was fired. [prep phrase as Adjunct of reason]
iii We cycle to work to save the busfare. [subordinate clause as Adjunct of purpose]
iv They left the country last week. [noun phrase as Adjunct of time]

5.3 Object and Predicative Complement

Two important subtypes of Complement are the Object and the Predicative Complement:

[10] a. Object: Ed blamed the minister. b. Predicative Comp: Ed was a minister..

While thousands of verbs license an Object, only a fairly small number license a Predicative Complement,
and of these be is by far the most common: others include become, remain, appear, seem, etc. The
term `Predicative Complement' is most easily understood by reference to the construction with be: the
verb has little meaning here (it is often called just a `linking verb'), so that the main semantic content of
the Predicate is expressed by the Complement.
There are several grammatical properties that distinguish Objects from Predicative Complements,
of which the two most important ones are illustrated in [11]:

[11] i a. Ed blamed the minister. [Object] b. The minister was blamed by Ed.
ii a. Ed was a minister. [Pred Comp] b. *A minister was been by Ed.
iii a. Ed was innocent. [Pred Comp] b. *Ed blamed innocent.
o The Object of an active clause can usually become the Subject of a corresponding passive clause,
but a Predicative Complement never can. Thus the Object of active [ia] corresponds to the Subject
of passive [ib], whereas [iib] is not a possible passive version of [iia]. (Here and below the asterisk
indicates that what follows is ungrammatical.)
o A Predicative Complement can be realised not only by a noun phrase, as in [iia], but also by an
adjective phrase, as in [iiia], whereas an Object cannot be realised by an adjective phrase, as
evident from the ungrammaticality of [iiib].

5.4 Direct and Indirect Object

A clause may contain two Objects, distinguished as Direct and Indirect. In canonical clauses, the Indirect
Object always precedes the Direct Object, and typically (but not invariably) is associated with the
semantic role of recipient or beneficiary:

[12] i He gave the prisoner some water. [Indirect Object (recipient) + Direct Object]
ii She baked me a cake. [Indirect Object (beneficiary) + Direct Object]

5.5 Subjective and Objective Predicative Complements

The Predicative Complements in [10b] and [11iia/iiia] are related to the Subject, but it is also possible for
a Predicative Complement to be related to the Object: we accordingly distinguish two subtypes,
Subjective and Objective. Compare:

[13] Subjective Pred Comp Objective Pred Comp

i a. He became angry. b. This made him angry.
ii a. He was a charlatan. b. They considered him a charlatan.

5.6 Five canonical clause structures

On the basis of the presence or absence of the Complement types considered so far we can distinguish
the following canonical clause structures:

[14] Example Structure Name

i They disappeared. S-P (Ordinary) intransitive
ii They were ecstatic. S-P-PCs Complex-intransitive
iii They bought a house. S-P-Od (Ordinary) monotransitive
iv They kept it warm. S-P-Od-PCo Complex-transitive
v They sent her some flowers. S-P-Oi-Od Ditransitive

In the representations of the structures, S stands for Subject, P for Predicator, PC s for Subjective
Predicative Complement, Od for Direct Object, PCo for Objective Predicative Complement, and Oi for
Indirect Object. The names reflect the fact that there are two dimensions of contrast:
o One has to do with Objects: an intransitive clause has no Object, a monotransitive clause has a
single Object, and a ditransitive clause has two Objects.
o The other has to with Predicative Complements: if a clause contains a Predicative Complement it is
complex, otherwise ordinary, though the latter term is often omitted (as it is in [v], since there is no
possibility of adding a Predicative Complement to a ditransitive clause).

The names apply in the first instance to the clause constructions, and then derivatively to the verbs
that appear in these constructions. Thus disappear is an (ordinary) intransitive verb, be a complex-
intransitive one, and so on. But it must be borne in mind that the majority of verbs can appear in more
than one of them, and hence belong to more than one class. Find, for example, commonly appears in [iii]
(We found the key), [iv] (We found her co-operative), and [v] (We found her a job).

5.7 Prepositional and clausal Complements.

The Complements considered so far have been noun phrases or adjective phrases, but these are not the
only possibilities. Complements often have the form of preposition phrases or subordinate clauses:
[15] i a. She went to Paris. b. She took him to Paris.
ii a. She relied on her instinct. b. He congratulated her on her promotion.
iii a. He said he was sorry. b. He told her he was sorry.
iv a. We intend to leave on Tuesday. b. I advise you to leave on Tuesday.

In the [a] examples here the underlined preposition phrase ([i-ii]) or subordinate clause ([iii-iv]) is the only
Complement, while in the [b] ones it follows an Object. We look at different kinds of subordinate clause in
Section13, but there is one point to be made here about the prepositional constructions. In [i] to contrasts
with other prepositions such as over, from, via, beyond, etc., but in [ii] on is selected by the verb: any
adequate dictionary will tell you (if only by example) that rely takes a Complement
with on, consist with of, refer with to, and so on. Verbs like these that take as Complement a preposition
phrase headed by some specified preposition are called `prepositional verbs'. Most ditransitive verbs also
belong to this latter class by virtue of licensing a preposition phrase with to or for instead of the Indirect
Object: compare He gave some water to the prisoner and She baked a cake for me with [12] above.

6 VERBS
6.1 Verb inflection
The most distinctive property of verbs is their inflection: they have a number of inflectional forms that are
permitted or required in various grammatical constructions. The present tense form takes, for example,
can occur as the verb of a canonical clause, whereas the past participle taken cannot: She takes
care, but not *She taken care.
The great majority of verb lexemes have six inflectional forms, as illustrated in [16]:

[16] i Preterite checked She checked the figures herself.

ii 3rd singular present checks She checks the figures herself.
iii Plain present check They check the figures themselves.
iv Plain form check She may check the figures herself.
v Gerund-participle checking She is checking the figures herself.
vi Past participle checked She had checked the figures herself.

It will be noticed that although we have distinguished six different inflectional forms, there are only four
different shapes: checked, checks, check and checking. By `shape' we mean the spelling or
pronunciation. Thus the preterite and past participle of the lexeme check have the same shape, as do the
plain present tense and the plain form. The same applies to all other regular verbs, i.e. verbs whose
inflectional forms are determined by general rules. But there are a good number of irregular verbs where
the preterite and past participle do not have the same shape: take, for example, has took as its preterite
and taken as its past participle.
This means that it is very easy to decide whether any particular instance of the shape check is a
preterite form or a past participle. What you need to do is ask which form of a verb like take would be
needed in the construction in question. Consider, then, the following examples:

[17] i She may have checked the figures herself.

ii I'm not sure whether she checked the figures herself or not.

If we substitute take for check in [i] the form we need is the past participle taken: She may have taken a
break. So this checked is likewise a past participle. And if we make the substitution in [ii] we need the
preterite form took: I'm not sure whether she took a break or not. So the checked of [ii] is the preterite
form. Note that when making the substitution you need to keep constant what precedes the verb
(e.g. She may have in [i]) since this is what determines the inflection that is required: what follows the
verb is irrelevant and hence can be changed to suit the verb you are substituting.
Let us now briefly review the six forms.
(a) Preterite. This is a type of past tense: the type where the past tense is marked inflectionally rather
than by means of an auxiliary verb. Many grammars use the more general term `past tense': we prefer
the more specific term to distinguish it from the construction where the auxiliary have marks the other
kind of past tense, as in She has checked the proofs.

(b)-(c) The present tense forms. There are two present tense forms, one which occurs with a 3rd person
singular subject, and one which occurs with any other subject: 1st person (I check), 2nd person (you
check) or plural (they check). We could call this latter form `non-3rd person singular', but `plain present' is
simpler. `Plain' indicates that it is identical with the morphological base of the lexeme, i.e. the starting-
point for the rules that produce the various inflectional forms by adding a suffix, changing the vowel, and
so on.

(d) The plain form. This is also identical with the base, but it is not a present tense form. It is used in three
constructions:

[18] i Imperative Check the figures yourself!

ii Infinitival It's better to check the figures oneself. I will check them myself.
iii Subjunctive It's essential that she check the figures herself.

The infinitival construction is very often marked by to, but it is also found without to after such verbs
as can, may, will, do (She didn't check the figures herself), make (They made me check the figures
myself), etc. The subjunctive is much the least frequent of the three constructions and belongs to
somewhat formal style.
There are two major factors that distinguish the plain form from the plain present:
o The verb be is highly exceptional in its inflection in that it has three present tense forms instead of
the usual two (is, am, are) and all of these are different in shape from the plain form be. It's the
latter form that appears in the three constructions shown in [18]: Be quiet (imperative); It's better
to be safe than sorry, I will be ready in time (infinitival); It's essential that she be told (subjunctive).
So we can tell whether a given instance of check, say, is the plain present or the plain form by using
the substitution test illustrated above, but this time substituting the verb be. Thus the check of We
must check the figures is a plain form, not a plain present tense because we need the plain form
of be in this position: We must be careful.
o The plain present doesn't occur with 3rd person singular Subjects, but the plain form does.
Compare She checks the figures herself (not *She check the figures herself) and She will check the
figures herself (not *She will checks the figures herself).

(e) The gerund-participle. This form always ends with the suffix @ing. Traditional grammar distinguishes
two forms with this suffix, the gerund and the present participle:

[19] i Checking the figures can be onerous [traditional gerund]

ii People checking the figures must be alert [traditional present participle]

The idea was that a gerund is comparable to a noun, while a participle is comparable to an adjective.
Thus in [i] checking the figures is comparable to such checks, where checks is a noun; in [ii] checking the
figures is Modifier to people and was therefore considered adjective-like since the most common type of
Modifier to a noun is an adjective.[4] There is, however, no verb in English that has distinct forms for the
constructions in [19], and so there is no basis for making any inflectional distinction here in Present-day
English: we thus have a single form and the name `gerund-participle' indicates that it covers both
traditional categories.

(f) The past participle. This is used in two main constructions, the perfect and the passive:

[20] i Perfect She has checked the figures.

ii Passive The figures must be checked by the boss.
The perfect is a past tense marked by the auxiliary verb have, while the most straightforward cases of the
passive involve the auxiliary verb be. We retain the traditional term `past participle', though the `past'
component of meaning applies just to the perfect construction.

6.2 The inflectional tense system

We have seen that there are two inflectional tenses in English: preterite and present; we review now the
major uses of these tenses.

(a) Preterite. Three uses can be distinguished, as illustrated in [21]:

[21] i Past time a. He arrived yesterday. b. She knew him well.

ii Backshift a. Ed said he was ill. b. I thought it started tomorrow.
iii Modal remoteness a. I wish I knew the answer. b. I'd do it if you paid me.

o In [i] we see the basic use, indicating past time. The event of his arriving took place in the past, and
the state of her knowing him well obtained in the past (it may still obtain now, but I'm talking about
some time in the past). This is much the most frequent use, but it's important to be aware that the
preterite doesn't always have this meaning.
o Example [iia] could be used to report Ed's saying `I am ill': present tense am is shifted back to
preterite was under the influence of the preterite reporting verb said. In [iib] my original thought was
`It starts tomorrow': again present tense starts is shifted back to preterite started. This example
shows very clearly that the backshift use is not the same as the past time use, for clearly the
starting is not in the past.
o In [iii] the preterite has a modal rather than temporal meaning: it has to do with factuality, not time.
In [iiia] the subordinate clause has a counterfactual meaning under the influence of wish: you
understand that I don't know the answer. The time is present, not past: I don't know it now. The
conditional [iiib] is not counterfactual (it doesn't rule out the possibility of your paying me), but it
envisages your paying me as a somewhat remote possibility - rather less likely than with the
present tense counterpart I'll do it if you pay me. Note that the time of your possibly paying me is in
the future. We use the term `modal remoteness' to cover both these interpretations (as well as
others mentioned briefly in Section6.5).

(b) The present tense. The two most important uses are seen in [22]:

[22] i Present time a. I promise I'll help you. b. She lives in Sydney.
ii Future time a. Exams start next week. b. I'll go home when it gets dark.

o In [i] we again have the basic and much the most common use: to indicate present time. In [ia] the
event of my promising is actually simultaneous with the utterance, for I perform the act of promising
by saying this sentence. In [ib] we have a state, and the present tense indicates that the state
obtains at the time of speaking.

o In [ii] the time is future. In main clauses this is possible only when the event is in some way already
scheduled, as in [iia]. But this constraint does not apply in various kinds of subordinate clause such
as we have in [iib].

6.3 Auxiliary verbs

We turn now to the important subclass of verbs called auxiliary verbs, or auxiliaries: they are quite
markedly different in their grammatical behaviour from other verbs, which are called lexical verbs.

6.3.1 Membership of the class

The main members of the auxiliary class are shown in [23], where they are divided into two
subclasses, modal and non-modal:
[23] i Modal auxiliaries can, may, must, will, shall, ought, need, dare
ii Non-modal auxiliaries be, have, do

(Could, might, would and should are the preterite forms of can, may, will and shall respectively, though
they differ considerably from other preterites, as we shall see.)

6.3.2 Distinctive properties

There are several constructions which require the presence of an auxiliary verb, the two most frequent of
which involve Subject-auxiliary inversion and negation.

(a) Subject-auxiliary inversion. We have seen that in canonical clauses the Subject precedes the verb
whereas in most interrogative main clauses the Subject follows the (first) verb. The verb that precedes the
Subject, however, must be an auxiliary verb: only auxiliaries can invert with the Subject. Compare:

[24] Auxiliary verb Lexical verb

i a. She has taken the car. b. She took the car. [declarative]
ii a. Has she taken the car? b. *Took she the car? [interrogative]

If the declarative doesn't contain an auxiliary, as in [ib], it is necessary to insert the auxiliary do so that
inversion can apply: Did she take the car? This do has no meaning: it is simply inserted to satisfy the
grammatical rule requiring an auxiliary.

(b) Negation. The construction where not is used to negate the verb likewise requires that the verb be an
auxiliary:

[25] Auxiliary verb Lexical verb

i a. She has taken the car. b. She took the car. [positive]
ii a. She has not taken the car. b. *She took not the car. [negative]

Again, if there is no auxiliary in the positive, do must be inserted to form the negative: She did not take
the car.
A further, related, point is that auxiliaries, but not lexical verbs, have negative forms ending in the
suffix n't: a more informal variant of [25iia] is She hasn't taken the car.

6.3.3 Auxiliaries as Heads

It is important to emphasise that auxiliaries contrast with lexical verbs, not with what some grammars call
`main verbs'. Auxiliaries function as Head, not Dependent, in verb phrase structure. They mostly take
non-finite clauses as Complement, like many lexical verbs. Compare the examples in [26], where the verb
phrase is enclosed in brackets, the Head is in capitals and underlining marks the non-finite clause
functioning as its Complement:

[26] Auxiliary verb as Head Lexical verb as Head

i a. They [OUGHT to accept the offer]. b. They [INTEND to accept the offer].
ii a. We [CAN answer their queries]. b. We [HELP answer their queries].
iii a. She [WAS checking the figures]. b. She [BEGAN checking the figures].
iv a. He [WAS attacked by a dog]. b. He [GOT attacked by a dog].

The particular type of non-finite clause that is used depends on the Head verb, whether auxiliary or
lexical. Ought and intend license infinitivals with to, can and help infinitivals without to; be, in one of its
uses, and beginlicense a non-finite clause with a gerund-participle form of the verb; be, in a second use,
and get license one with a past participle form of the verb.
Note, then, that the verb phrase in [iiia], say, is divided into was + checking the figures, not was
checking + the figures, just as that in [iiib] is divided into began + checking the figures, not began
checking + the figures. And similarly with the other examples.
6.4 The non-modal auxiliaries, be, have, do
Little further need be said about do: it is used in constructions like Subject-auxiliary inversion and
negation when required to satisfy the requirement that the construction contain an auxiliary. There is also
a lexical verb do used in clauses like She did her best, I did him an injustice, etc.; here, then,
auxiliary do must be added to form interrogatives and negatives: Did she do her best?, I didn't do him an
injustice.

(a) Be. Three uses of be can be distinguished, illustrated in :

[27] i Progressive marker a. They are watching TV. b. I've been working all morning.
ii Passive marker a. It was taken by Jill. b. He may be arrested.
iii Copula a. She was a friend of his. b. That is very likely.

o In [i], where be is followed by a verb in the gerund-participle form, it is a marker of progressive

aspect. It generally serves to indicate that the situation - the action, event, state, or whatever - was,
is or will be in progress at the time in question.
o The clauses in [ii] are passive; [iia] is the passive counterpart of active Jill took it, the presence
of be being one of the major differences between the two forms. There is no active counterpart of
[iib] because the latter has no by phrase (cf. Section15).
o In [iii] be is the only verb, but it still behaves as an auxiliary. Thus the interrogative of [a] is Was she
a friend of his? and the negative of [b] is That isn't very likely. In these examples the auxiliary has
as its Complement not a non-finite clause but a noun phrase (a friend of his) and an adjective
phrase (very likely).

(b) Have. This verb belongs to both lexical and auxiliary classes. In She had a swim it is a lexical verb, for
the interrogative and negative counterparts are Did she have a swim? and She didn't have a swim. The
auxiliary uses are seen in [28]:

[28] i Perfect marker a. He has broken his leg. b. He may have taken it yesterday.
ii Static have a. She has enough credit. b. We have to invite them all.

o The perfect is marked by auxiliary have + a past participle. It is best regarded as a secondary past
tense - the primary past tense being the inflectional preterite. Note, for example, that the preterite is
found only in finite constructions such as He took it yesterday, so it can't occur after may (cf. *He
may took it yesterday: may takes an infinitival clause as Complement), and perfect have is then
used instead, as in [ib]. Since have itself can inflect for tense, [ia] is doubly marked for tense: it is
`past in present', the past being marked by the lexeme have and the present by the inflection
on have. This reflects the fact that while the event of his breaking his leg is located in past time it is
seen as having relevance to the present. The most likely scenario is that his leg has not yet healed,
so that he is at present incapacitated. The present tense component also explains why it is not
normally possible to add an Adjunct like yesterday: *He has broken his leg yesterday.
o Have in [ii] denotes a state, unlike that of the above She had a swim, which is dynamic, denoting an
event. Usage is divided as to whether static have is an auxiliary or a lexical verb. Those who
say She hasn't enough credit or Have we to invite them all? and the like are treating it as an
auxiliary, while those who say She doesn't have enough credit or Do we have to invite them all? are
treating it as a lexical verb. Many people use both constructions, though the lexical verb treatment
has been gaining ground for some time. Note that in [iia] have, like be in [27], doesn't have a non-
finite clause as Complement.

6.5 The modal auxiliaries

In this section we first note that need and dare, like do and have above, belong to both auxiliary and
lexical verb classes; we next set out the main grammatical properties that define the class of modal
auxiliaries, then consider the preterite forms, and finally look at the kinds of meaning they express.
(a) Need and dare. These are auxiliaries only when followed by an infinitival construction without to, as
in Need I bother? and I daren't tell them, etc. Thus in I need a haircut, I need to get my hair cut, I dare you
to repeat that, etc. we have lexical verbs.

(b) Distinctive grammatical properties of modal auxiliaries

o They have only tensed forms: no plain form, no gerund-participle, no past participle. Hence the
impossibility of *I'd like to may go with you; *We're musting invite them all, *She has could speak
French since she was a child.
o They are invariable in the present tense instead of having a distinct form in @s used with 3rd person
singular Subjects: She can swim, not *She cans swim, etc.
o With one exception they license a following infinitival Complement without to: She can swim, not
*She can to swim. The exception is ought: They ought to accept the offer (=[26ia]).

Note that although We have to invite them all has essentially the same meaning as We must invite them
all, this have is not a modal auxiliary: it has none of the above three grammatical properties. It is a special
case of the static have, illustrated in [28ii], and as such it is for many speakers not an auxiliary at all, but a
lexical verb.

(c) The preterite forms. Could, might, would and should are the preterite forms
of can, may, will and shall respectively, but the use of these preterites differs from that of other preterite
forms in Present-day English.
o Only could and would have the basic preterite use of indicating past time: I could do it easily when I
was younger; I asked him to help but he wouldn't.
o The status of might and should as preterites is established by their use in certain conditional
constructions and in those cases of reported speech or thought where present tense forms are
excluded. Thus though we can have may in If you come back tomorrow you may find him in, we
need might in If you came back tomorrow you might find him in.[5] And if at some time in the past I
had the thought `I shall easily finish before she returns' I would report this with should, as in I knew I
should easily finish before she returned (not *shall).
o The major difference is that while with other verbs the modal remoteness use of the preterite is
restricted to certain kinds of subordinate clause, with the modal auxiliaries it occurs in main clauses
and with a wider range of interpretation; with might and should it is overwhelmingly the most
frequent use. The preterites tend to be weaker, more tentative or polite than the present tense
forms.

(d) Types of modal meaning. The modal auxiliaries express a considerable variety of meanings, but they
can be grouped into three major types.
o Epistemic modality. Here we are concerned with what is necessary, likely or
possible: He must have overslept; Dinner should be ready in a few minutes; She may be ill.
o Deontic modality. Here it is a matter of what is required or permitted: You must work
harder; You should be studying for your exam; You can/may go with them if you like.
o Dynamic modality. Here it is a question of properties or dispositions of persons or other entities
involved in the situation: She can speak very persuasively (ability), Will you help me? (willingness).
This kind of meaning is mainly found with just can, will and dare.

In some cases there is a clear ambiguity as to which type of meaning is intended. You must be very
tactful, for example, can be interpreted epistemically (I'm inferring from evidence that you are very tactful)
or deontically (I'm telling you to be very tactful). She can't be serious may be understood epistemically
(She is obviously not being serious) or dynamically (She is unable to be serious).

7 NOUNS AND NOUN PHRASES

7.1 Distinctive properties of nouns
Nouns form much the largest word class. It contains all words that denote physical entities, but also great
numbers of words that do not have this semantic property: in order to be able to identify nouns we
therefore need to examine their grammatical properties. We consider them under three headings:
inflection, function and dependents.

(a) Inflection. Nouns generally exhibit inflectional contrasts of number and case:

[29] Number Case

Plain Genitive
i Singular student student's
ii Plural students students'

School grammars commonly use the term `possessive' instead of `genitive', but that term is far too
specific for the wide range of relationships covered by this case: compare, for example, Kim's parents, the
boys' behaviour, the train's arrival, the mayor's obituary, the sun's rays, today's news.

(b) Function. Nouns can function as Head in noun phrases that in turn function as Subject or Complement
in clause structure, or Complement of a preposition, as illustrated in [30], where nouns are underlined and
noun phrases bracketed:

[30] i Subject in clause [One student] was arrested.

ii Complement in clause They interviewed [all the students].
iii Complement in prep phrase The talk was given by [a student].

(c) Dependents. There are some kinds of Dependent that occur exclusively (or almost exclusively) with a
noun as Head:

[31] i Certain determinatives the student, a school, every book, which exam
ii Pre-head adjectives. mature students, a new book, an easy exam
iii Relative clauses the student who directed the play, a book I'm reading

7.2 The structure of noun phrases

Noun phrases typically consist of a Head noun alone or accompanied by one or more Dependents. The
Dependents are of three main types: Determiners, Complements and Modifiers.

(a) Determiners. These are found uniquely in the structure of noun phrases. They have the form of
determinatives (or determinative phrases, as in almost all students, not many people, too few volunteers)
or genitive noun phrases (the girl's voice, some people's behaviour, my book).

Determiners serve to mark the noun phrase as definite or indefinite.

[32] i Definite the Premier of NSW, the key, this book, both copies, the man's death
ii Indefinite a politician, some keys, any serious book, enough copies, three dogs

We use a definite noun phrase when we assume that its content is sufficient, in the context, to identify
the referent. There's only one (current) Premier of NSW, so the definiteness in the first example is
unproblematic, but with the second example there is of course very heavy reliance on context to make the
referent clear. The is a pure marker of definiteness, known as the definite article. Its use effectively pre-
empts a which question: if I say Where's the key? I assume you won't need to ask Which key? Note that a
genitive Determiner confers definiteness on the noun phrase: the man's death means `the death of the
man', and a man's death likewise means `thedeath of a man'. Noun phrases like black coffee and friends,
which have a common noun as Head and no Determiner are normally indefinite.
(b) Complements. The clearest cases of Complements involve preposition phrases where the preposition
is specified by the Head noun, and certain types of subordinate clause:

[33] i Preposition phrases her review of the play, a ban on alcohol, his marriage to Sue
ii Subordinate clauses the idea that he might be ill, an opportunity to make friends

Note that nouns, unlike verbs, do not take Objects: we say She reviewed the play, but not *her review the
play; instead we need of the play. With ban and marriage the prepositions required are on and to. The
subordinate clauses in [ii] clearly satisfy the licensing test: only a fairly narrow range of nouns can take
Complements like these.

(c) Modifiers. The typical pre-Head Modifier is an adjective or adjective phrase: a good book, a very
serious matter. But those are not the only possibilities. In particular, nouns can also function as Modifier
to a Head noun: a school play, the unemployment situation, etc. Post-Head Modifiers are typically
preposition phrases and subordinate clauses that occur more freely than Complements in that they do not
have to be licensed by the Head noun: a man of honour, the house opposite the post office, the play that
she wrote, the guy who spoke first.
It is also possible to have Modifiers that precede the Determiner: all the books, both these
plays, too small a car for our needs. Note that adverbs can occur in this position, but not after the
Determiner: absolutely the best solution, but not *an absolutely success. Instead of the latter we need an
adjective, an absolute success.

7.3 Number and countability

(a) Nouns with fixed number. Although most nouns have an inflectional contrast between singular and
plural, there are a good few that do not - that have only singular or only plural forms:

[34] i Singular-only nouns crockery, dross, harm, nonsense; news, mumps, physics, ...
ii Plural-only nouns belongings, clothes, genitals, scissors; cattle, police, ...

Note that the last three items in [i] end in @s but are nevertheless singular, as evident, for example, from
the agreement in This news is good. Conversely, the last two items in [ii] don't end in @s, but are
nevertheless plural: cf. These cattle are in good health.

(b) Count and non-count nouns. Related to the distinction between nouns with variable number and
nouns with fixed number is that between count and non-count nouns. Count nouns can take cardinal
numerals (one, two, three, etc.) as Dependent, while non-count nouns cannot. Compare
count student (one student, two students) and non-count harm and clothes (*one harm/clothes, *two
harms/clothes).

However, most nouns can occur with either a count or a non-count interpretation:

[35] Count interpretation Non-count interpretation

i a. He pulled out a white hair. b. He has white hair.
ii a. Have another cake. b. Have some more cake.
iii a. Can I borrow your football. b. Let's play football.

The interpretations in [a] allow for a contrast between one and more than one (cf., for example, He pulled
out two white hairs), but those in [b] do not. When we speak of count and non-count nouns, therefore, we
are referring to nouns as used with a count and non-count interpretation. Thus hair is a count noun in [ia],
a non-count noun in [ib], and so on.

(c) Subject-verb agreement. We noted in Section5.1 that where a verb has person-number properties
they normally agree with those of the Subject noun phrase, more particularly with those of the Head noun
of that noun phrase: The dog is barking vs The dogs are barking. There are, however, certain
semantically-motivated types of departure from this pattern, as illustrated in [36]:
[36] i Measure expressions Two hours isn't long enough for such a job.
ii Quantificational nouns A lot of people like it.
iii Collective nouns The jury haven't yet reached a decision.

o In [i] the hours aren't thought of individually but as making up a single period, so the Subject is
treated as singular.
o In [ii] the verb-form is determined not by the Head noun lot but by people, which is embedded within
the Subject noun phrase.
o With collective nouns like jury in [iii] there is divided usage, with singular hasn't also used.

7.4 Subclasses of noun

There are three main subclasses of noun: common noun, proper noun and pronoun. Common noun is
the default subclass and needs no further comment here.

(a) Proper nouns. This subclass includes nouns such

as John, Mary, Smith, Beethoven, Sydney, Egypt, Nile, Easter, Friday, etc. They characteristically
function as Head of noun phrases serving as proper names, names individually assigned to particular
people, places, festivals, days of the week, and so on. Note, however, that they also occur, derivatively, in
other kinds of noun phrase: That's not the Smith I was referring to, Let's listen to some Beethoven.
Conversely, not all proper names contain proper nouns: cf. Central Avenue, New Year's Day, and so on.
And some proper names contain more than just a proper noun: the Nile, Mt Everest, King John.

(b) Pronouns. The grammatically distinctive property of pronouns is that they do not normally combine
with Determiners: He arrived, not *The he arrived. There are several subtypes of pronoun, including:

[37] i Personal pronouns I, we, you, he, she, it, they, one
ii Reciprocal pronouns each other, one another
iii Interrogative or relative pronouns who, what, which, whoever, etc.

We will comment here on only the first of these categories. Personal pronouns are those where we find
contrasts of person. I and we are first person, used to refer to the speaker or a group containing the
speaker. (`Speaker' is to be understood as covering the writer in written texts.) You is second person,
used to refer to the addressee or a group containing one or more addressees. The others are third
person: this doesn't encode reference to speaker or addressee and therefore usually refers to entities
other than the speaker or addressee. But I can refer to myself or to you in the third person: The writer has
noticed ...; The reader may recall ...
The personal pronouns have five inflectional forms:

[38] i Nominative I, we, you, ... I did it. It was I who did it.
ii Accusative me, us, you, ... It bit me. It was me who did it.
iii Dependent genitive my, our, your, ... My son is here. I saw your car.
iv Independent genitive mine, ours, yours, ... Mine was broken. That's mine.
v Reflexive myself, ourselves, ... I hurt myself. We talk to ourselves.

Nominatives occur mostly as Head of a Subject noun phrase. In formal style they can also occur in
certain types of Predicative Complement, with the accusative as a less formal variant: It was I/me who did
it. In other types, however, only the accusative is possible: The victim was me, not *The victim was I, and
the like. Dependent genitives occur when there is a following Head in the noun phrase, independent ones
when there isn't. Reflexives usually relate back to the Subject noun phrase, as in the above examples.

8 ADJECTIVES AND ADJECTIVE PHRASES

8.1 Two major functions of adjectives
Most adjectives can be either attributive or predicative:
[39] i Attributive a hot day, some new DVDs, this excellent play, lonely people
ii Predicative It's hot. These look new. I found it excellent. They seem lonely.

Attributive adjectives are pre-head Modifiers in noun phrase structure; predicative adjectives are
Predicative Complements in clause structure (see Section5.5).[6]
There are, however, some adjectives that are restricted to one or other of these functions:

[40] i Attributive-only the main speaker, a mere child, the only problem, my own car
ii Never-attributive I'm afraid. She's asleep. He looks content. It's liable to flood.

8.2 Gradability and grade

The most central adjectives are gradable: they denote properties that can apply in varying degrees. As
such, they can be modified by adverbs of degree and (under conditions relating to length and form) be
inflected for comparative (e.g. taller) and superlative (e.g. tallest) grade:

[41] i Degree modification very good, quite hot, rather young, too old, incredibly bad
ii Inflection for grade hotter, younger, older, better; hottest, youngest, oldest, best

Gradable adjectives that don't inflect mark comparative and superlative degree by means of the
adverbs more and most respectively: more intelligent, most intelligent.
There are also a good number of adjectives that denote non-scalar properties and hence are non-
gradable: alphabetical order, the chief difficulty, the federal government, her right eye, third place. Some
adjectives, moreover, can be used in two different senses, one gradable, the other non-gradable (and
usually the more basic). In The door is open, for example, open is non-gradable, but in You should be
more open with us it is gradable.

8.3 The structure of adjective phrases

Adjective phrases consist of an adjective as Head, alone or accompanied by one or more Dependents,
which may be Complements or Modifiers:

[42] i Complements good at chess, grateful for your help, fond of animals, keen on golf,
glad that you liked it, unsure what had happened, eager to help
ii Modifiers very bad, morally wrong, this good, most useful, much better, two
days long, a bit old, cautious to excess, dangerous in the extreme

The Complements are preposition phrases or subordinate clauses; in the former case the adjective
selects a particular preposition to head the Complement: fond takes of, keen takes on, and so on. The
Modifiers are adverbs (e.g. very), determinatives (this), noun phrases (two days) or post-Head
prepositional phrases. Adjective phrases containing post-Head Dependents cannot normally be used
attributively: He's good at chess, but not *a good at chess schoolboy.

9 ADVERBS AND ADVERB PHRASES.

9.1 Adverbs in relation to adjectives
The majority of adverbs are derived from adjectives by adding the suffix @ly: common - commonly, rare -
rarely, etc. There are a good number of adverbs not formed in this way, some of them very common
(e.g. almost, always, often, quite, rather, soon, too, very), but these are normally recognisable as adverbs
by virtue of being replaceable by ones with the @ly suffix:
compare It's very good and It's extremely good; She always wins and She frequently wins; It'll be
over soon and It'll be over shortly, and so on.
The major difference between adverbs and adjectives has to do with their functions. We have seen
that adjectives function attributively or predicatively, but adverbs do not normally occur in these functions:
compare attributive a successful meeting, not *a successfully meeting, and predicative The meeting
was successful, not *The meeting was successfully. Adverbs function as Modifier to a wide range of word
or phrase classes, as illustrated in [43], where underlining marks the modifying adverb and capitals what
it modifies:

[43] Adverb modifying:

i Verb She SPOKE clearly. She PLAYED well.
ii Adjective It's a remarkably GOOD play It looks very GOOD
iii Adverb He spoke virtually INAUDIBLY. They almost NEVER reply.
iv Determinative Nearly ALL copies were sold. Too FEW copies were printed.
v Prep phrase She is completely IN CONTROL. It's quite BEYOND BELIEF.
vi Rest of clause Surprisingly EVERYONE AGREED Frankly, IT'S USELESS.

In general adverbs that can modify adjectives and other adverbs can also modify verbs, but there are
some exceptions, most notably very and too (in the sense `excessively'). Compare He's very FOND of
her and *He veryLOVES her (we need He loves her very MUCH).
A few adverbs inflect for grade (soon, sooner, soonest), but for the most part comparatives and
superlatives are marked by more and most: more carefully, most carefully.

9.2 The structure of adverb phrases

The structure of adverb phrases is broadly similar to that of adjective phrases, but simpler: in particular,
very few adverbs license complements.

[44] i Complements Luckily for me, it rained. We handled it similarly to the others.
ii Modifiers She sang very well. It won't end that soon. We left a bit late.

10 PREPOSITIONS AND PREPOSITION PHRASES.

The most central members of the preposition class have meanings concerned with relations in time or
space: after lunch, at school, before the end, in the garden, off the bridge, on the desk, etc. In this section
we look at the function of prepositions and then at their Complements, and finally consider the
phenomenon of preposition stranding.

(a) Function of prepositions. Prepositions function as Head in preposition phrases, and these in turn
function as Dependent (Complement or Modifier) to any of the four major parts of speech:

[45] Prep phrase dependent on:

i Verb She WENT to London. They ARE in the garden.
ii Noun He's a MAN of principle. It's on the WAY to Paris.
iii Adjective She's INTERESTED in politics. I'm RESPONSIBLE for them
iv Adverb LUCKILY for me, no-one knew. I saw her LATER in the day.

(b) Complements of prepositions. Usually (as in all the examples in [45]) prepositions take a noun phrase
as Complement. There are, however, other possibilities:

[46] i Preposition phrase He emerged [from under the bed. I'll stay [until after lunch].
ii Adjective phrase That strikes me [as unfair]. I took him [for dead].
iii Adverb phrase I didn't know [until recently ]. I can't stay [for long].
iv Clause It depends [on what she says]. I told her [before she left].[7]

(c) Preposition stranding. In a number of clause constructions the Complement of a preposition is placed
at the front of the clause or omitted altogether, leaving the preposition `stranded':

[47] i a. What are you looking at? b. It's something [which I can do without].
ii a. This is the book [I was referring to]. b. He went to the same school as [I went to].
The construction is characteristic of relatively informal style, but it is a serious mistake to say that it is
grammatically incorrect.

11 NEGATION
(a) Clausal vs subclausal negation. Negation is marked by individual words such as not, no, never, or by
affixes such as we have in uncommon, non-compliant, infrequent, careless, isn't, won't, etc. We need to
distinguish, however, between cases where the negative affects the whole clause (clausal negation) and
those where it affects just a part of it (subclausal negation):

[48] i Clausal negation a. He is not well. b. Surprisingly, he wasn't ill.

ii Subclausal negation a. He is unwell. b. Not surprisingly, he was ill.

The clauses in [i] are negative, but those in [ii] are positive even though they contain a negative element
within them. We say this because they behave like obviously positive clauses with respect to the
constructions shown in [49]:

[49] Interrogative tags And so vs and nor

i Positive a. He is well, isn't he? b. Surprisingly, he was ill and so was she.
ii Negative a. He is not well, is he? b. Surprisingly, he wasn't ill and nor was she.
iii Positive a. He is unwell, isn't he? b. Not surprisingly, he was ill and so was she.

o In [a] we have a clause followed by an interrogative `tag' used to seek confirmation of what has
been said. The usual type of tag reverses the `polarity' of the clause to which it is attached - that is,
it is negative if attached to a positive clause, as in [ia], and positive if attached to a negative clause,
as in [iia]. And we see from [iiia], therefore, that He is unwell counts as positive since the tag is
negative: the clause is no more negative than He is sick.

o In the [b] examples we have added a truncated clause introduced by and so or and nor. We get and
so after a positive clause and and nor after a negative one. And Not surprisingly, he was ill is shown
to be a positive clause because it takes and so.

(b) Non-affirmative items. There are a number of words or expressions that occur readily in negative or
interrogative clauses but generally not in positive declaratives. Compare:

[50] Declarative Interrogative

i Negative a. He didn't find any cracks. b. Didn't he find any cracks?
ii Positive a. *He found any cracks. b. Did he find any cracks?

Instead of [iia] we say He found some cracks. Such items as any in [50] are called non-affirmative (with
`affirmative' understood as combining declarative and positive). They include compounds with any@,
such as anybody, anyone, anything, etc., at all, either, ever, yet, budge, can bear, can stand, give a
damn, lift a finger, etc. More precisely, these are non-affirmative in at least one of their senses: some of
them also have senses in which they can occur in affirmative constructions. The any series of words, for
example, can occur in affirmative constructions when the meaning is close to `every', as in Anyone can
do that.

12 CLAUSE TYPE AND SPEECH ACTS

We use sentences to make statements, ask questions, make requests, give orders, and so on: these are
different kinds of speech act (a term understood, like `speaker', to cover writing as well as speech). The
grammatical counterpart is clause type, where we distinguish declarative, interrogative, and so on. The
main categories we recognise here are illustrated in [51]:

[51] i Declarative You are very tactful.

 ii Closed interrogative Are you very tactful?
iii Open interrogative How tactful are you?
iv Exclamative How tactful you are!
v Imperative Be very tactful.

We use different terms for the clause types than for the speech acts because the relation between the
two sets of categories is by no means one-to-one. Consider such examples as [52]:

[52] i You're leaving already?

ii I ask you again where you were on the evening of 14 July.
iii I promise to help you.
iv Would you mind opening the door for me?

Grammatically, [i] is declarative, but it would be used as a question: a question can be marked by rising
intonation (or by punctuation) rather than by the grammatical structure. Example [ii] is likewise declarative
but again it would be used as a question (perhaps in a court cross-examination): the question force this
time comes from the verb ask, in the present tense with a 1st person Subject. Promise in [iii] works in the
same way: this example would generally be used to make a promise. This illustrates the point that
although we have just a handful of different clause types there are a great many different kinds of speech
act: one can apologise, offer, congratulate, beseech, declare a meeting open, and so on. Finally, [iv] is a
closed interrogative but would characteristically be used to make a request. In this use it is what is called
an indirect speech act: although it is literally a question it actually conveys something else, a polite
request.
All canonical clauses are declarative and we need say no more about this type, but a few
comments are in order for the remaining four types.

(a) Closed interrogatives. These are so called because they are typically used to ask questions with a
closed set of answers. Usually these are Yes and No (or their equivalents), but in examples like Is it a boy
or a girl? they derive from the terms joined by or: It's a boy and It's a girl. Grammatically they are marked
by Subject-auxiliary inversion (though such inversion is not restricted to interrogatives: in the
declarative Never had I felt so embarrassed it is triggered by the initial placement of the negative never).

(b) Open interrogatives. These are typically used to ask questions with an open set of answers
(e.g. very, quite, slightly, etc. in the case of [51iii]). They are marked by the presence of an interrogative
phrase consisting of or containing a so-called `wh-word': who, what, when, where, how, etc. This phrase
may be Subject (Who said that?), Complement (What do you want?) or Adjunct (When did he leave?). If it
is Complement or Adjunct it normally occurs at the beginning of the clause, which has Subject-auxiliary
inversion, as in the last two examples. It is possible, however, for it to remain in post-verbal position, as
in And after that you went where? (a construction most likely to be found in a context of sustained
questioning).

(c) Exclamatives. These have, at the front of the clause, an exclamative phrase containing either how, as
in [51iv], or what, as in What a fool I've been!

(d) Imperatives. The most common type of imperative has you understood, as in [51v], or expressed as
Subject (as in You be careful; Don't you speak to me like that). The verb is in the plain form, but do is
used in the negative:Don't move. We also have 3rd person imperatives like Somebody open the window,
distinguished from the declarative precisely by the plain form verb. 1st person plural imperatives are
marked by let's: Let's go!, Don't let's bother.

13 SUBORDINATE CLAUSES
Subordinate clauses normally function in the structure of a phrase or a larger clause. Whereas main
clauses are almost invariably finite, subordinate clauses may be finite or non-finite.
13.1 Finite subordinate clauses.
The most central type of finite clause is tensed, i.e. contains a verb inflected for tense (preterite or
present tense), and most finite subordinate clauses are of this type. There is, however, one construction
containing a plain form of the verb that belongs in the finite class, the subjunctive:

[53] i She says that he is kept well-informed [tensed: is is present tense verb]
ii She insists that he be kept well-informed [subjunctive: be is plain form]

Subjunctive is thus the name of a syntactic construction, not an inflectional category, as in traditional
grammar. It has a plain form verb and when the Subject is a personal pronoun it appears in nominative
case.
We distinguish three main types of finite subordinate clause: content clauses, relative
clauses and comparative clauses.

13.1.1 Content clauses

These usually function as Subject or else Complement of a verb, noun, adjective or preposition:

[54] i That they accepted the offer is very fortunate. [Subject]

ii I KNOW she likes it. [Complement of verb]
iii The FACT that it's so cheap makes me suspicious. [Complement of noun]
iv We stayed in BECAUSE it was raining. [Complement of preposition]

Like main clauses they select for clause type, except that there are no subordinate imperatives:

[55] i Declarative He didn't know that everybody supported the proposal.

ii Closed interrogative He didn't know whether everybody supported the proposal.
iii Open interrogative He didn't know which proposal everybody supported.
iv Exclamative He didn't know what a lot of them supported the proposal..

o Declaratives are often marked by the subordinator that; and since that occurs in both the tensed
clause and the subjunctive in [53] we include both in the declarative class.

o Closed interrogatives have whether or if instead of the Subject-auxiliary inversion found in main
clauses (compare the main clause counterpart of the subordinate clause in [ii]: Did everybody
support the proposal?).
o Open interrogatives have the interrogative phrase in initial position and normally no Subject-
auxiliary inversion (again compare the main clause counterpart of that in [iii]: Which proposal did
everybody support?).
o Exclamatives mostly have the same form as their main clause counterparts, as with [iv].

13.1.2 Relative clauses

(a) Relative clauses as Modifier. The most central kind of relative clauses functions as Modifier in noun
phrase structure:

[56] i a. I agree with [the guy who spoke last]. b. I agree with [the guy that spoke last].
ii a. He lost [the key which I lent him]. b. He lost [the key I lent him].

Such clauses contain an overt or covert element which relates back to the Head noun, so we understand
in [i] that some guy spoke last and in [ii] that I lent him a key. This `relativised element' is overt in [ia] (the
relative pronoun who) and [iia] (which), but covert in the [b] examples. This is obvious in the case of [iib],
and in [ib] that, although traditionally classified as a relative pronoun, is better regarded as a subordinator,
the same one as is found in declarative content clauses like [55i]; on this analysis there is no overt
relativised element in [ib] any more than in [iib].
 The relativised element can have a variety of functions in the relative clause: in [56i] it is Subject, in
[56ii] Object, and so on.

(b) Supplementary relative clauses. The relative clauses in [56] are tightly integrated into the structure of
the sentence, but it is also possible for relative clauses to be set off by punctuation or intonation, so that
they have the status of more loosely attached Supplements, as in:

[57] i I've lent the car to my brother, who has just come over from New Zealand.
ii He overslept again, which made him miss the train.

In this type the relativised element is almost always overt, and doesn't relate back to a noun but to a
larger unit, a whole noun phrase in [i] (my brother) and a clause in [ii], where which is understood as `(the
fact) that he overslept again'.

(c) The fused relative construction. This is structurally more complex than the above constructions:

[58] i a. Whoever wrote this must be very naive. b. You can invite who you like.
ii a. He quickly spent what she gave him. b. What books he has are in the attic.

The underlined sequences here are not themselves clauses but noun phrases: clauses don't denote
entities that can be naive or be invited or spent or located in the attic. Note, moreover, that are in [iib]
agrees with a plural noun phrase Subject, whereas Subjects with the form of clauses take 3rd person
singular verbs, as in [54i]. Whoever in [58ia] is equivalent to the person who and what in [iia] to that
which, and so on. This is why we call this construction `fused': the Head of the noun phrase and the
relativised element are fused together, instead of being separate, as in [56ia/iia].
These constructions may look superficially like open interrogative content clauses. Compare [58iib],
for example, with I asked her what she gave him. The meaning is quite different: the latter, where the
underlined clause is interrogative, can be glossed as `I asked her the answer to the question, `What did
she give him?'', but there is no such question meaning in [58iia]. Similarly compare [58iib], meaning `The
(few) books he has are in the attic', with What books he has is unknown, where the underlined clause is
interrogative and the meaning is `The answer to the question `What books does he have?' is unknown';
note that this time the main clause verb is singular is, agreeing with the clausal Subject.

13.1.3 Comparative clauses

Comparative clauses generally function as Complement to the prepositions as and than:

[59] i a. I'm as ready as I ever will be. b. As was expected, Sue won easily.
ii a. More people came than I'd expected. b. He has more vices than he has virtues.

The distinctive property of such clauses is that they are structurally incomplete relative to main clauses:
there are elements understood but not overtly expressed. In [ia] and [iia] there's a missing Complement
and in [ib] a missing Subject. Even in [iib] there's a missing Dependent in the Object noun phrase, for the
comparison is between how many vices he has and how many virtues he has. The fact that there's some
kind of understood quantifier here is reflected in the fact that we can't insert an overt one: *He has more
vices than he has ten virtues.

13.2 Non-finite subordinate clauses

There are three major kinds of non-finite clause:

[60] i Infinitival a. He wants to see you. b. I can't help you.

ii Gerund-participial a. Buying a car was a mistake. b. He's the guy standing up.
iii Past-participial a. All things considered, it's OK. b. We got told off.
Infinitivals contain a plain form of the verb, with or without the special marker to; gerund-participials and
past-participials have verbs in the gerund-participle and past participle forms; for further examples, see
[26] above.
Most non-finite clauses have no overt Subject, but all three kinds allow one under certain
conditions.
o In infinitivals, it occurs in the to-variant with initial for as subordinator: For them to be so late is very
unusual.
o In gerund-participials a personal pronoun Subject usually appears in accusative case, but genitives
are found in relatively formal style: We objected to them/their being given extra privileges.
o Example [iiia] is a past-participial with an overt Subject.

Infinitivals are much the most frequent of the three classes of non-finite clause, and appear in a very
wide range of functions. These include Subject (To err is human), Complement of a verb (as in [60ia/b]:
the Head verb determines whether to is included), Complement of a noun (I applaud [her willingness to
compromise]), Complement of an adjective (She's [willing to compromise]), Adjunct (She walks to work to
keep fit), Modifier of a noun (I need [an album to keep the photos in]). In general, prepositions take
gerund-participials rather than infinitivals as Complement (He left [without saying good-bye]), but the
compound in order and so as are exceptions (She stayed at home [in order to study for the exam]).

14 COORDINATION
Coordination is a relation between two or more items of equal syntactic status, the coordinates. They are
of equal status in the sense that one is not a Dependent of another.

(a) The marking of coordination. Coordination is usually but not invariably marked by the presence of a
coordinator, such as and, or, nor, but; the first three of these may also be paired with a
determinative, both, either and neither respectively. The main patterns are seen in [61]:

[61] i We have no milk and the shops aren't open yet.

ii Her brother came too, but didn't stay long.
iii We can meet on Monday, on Thursday or at the week-end.
iv We can meet on Monday, or on Thursday or at the week-end.
v Both Jill and her husband attended the meeting.
vi He was self-confident, determined, egotistical.

Examples [i]-[iii] illustrate the most usual case: a coordinator in the last coordinate. In [iv] there is a
coordinator in all non-initial coordinates, in [v] a determinative in the first, and in [vi] no overt marking of
coordination at all.

(b) Functional likeness required between coordinates. Coordination can appear at more or less any place
in the structure of sentences. You can have coordination between main clauses (giving a compound
sentence, as in [61i]), between subordinate clauses, between phrases, between words (e.g. Have you
seen my father and mother?). But the coordinates need to be grammatically alike. Usually they belong to
the same class, as in all the examples in [61]. They do not have to be, however: the crucial constraint is
that they be alike in function. Compare, then:

[62] i She is very bright and a good leader.

ii I don't know the cause of the accident or how much damage was done.
iii *We're leaving Rome and next week.

o In [i] we have coordination between an adjective phrase and a noun phrase, and in [ii] between a
noun phrase and a subordinate clause (an open interrogative content clause). These are
acceptable because each coordinate could stand on its own with the same function: in She is very
bright and She is a good leader the underlined units are both Predicative Complements, and in I
 don't know the cause of the accident and I don't know how much damage was done they are both
Complements.
o But [iii] is unacceptable, even though the coordinates are of the same class, noun phrase, because
the functional likeness condition is not met. The function of Rome in We're leaving Rome is
Complement, whereas that of next week in We're leaving next week is Adjunct.

(c) Joint coordination. One special type of coordination is seen in [63]:

[63] a. Sam and Pat are a happy couple. b. Sam Pat and Alex like each other.

What is distinctive about this type is that the properties concerned, being a happy couple and liking each
other, apply to the coordinates jointly rather than separately. So we can't say *Sam is a happy couple or
*Pat likes each other. The functional likeness in this type is that the coordinates denote members of a set
to which the relevant property applies. The construction is more restricted than the type illustrated in [61]
in that it excludes determinatives (*Both Sam and Pat are a happy couple), doesn't allow but as
coordinator, and does require likeness of class between the ccoordinates.

15 INFORMATION PACKAGING
The grammar of the clause makes available a number of constructions that enable us to express a given
core meaning in different ways depending on how we wish to to present or `package' the information. For
example, Kim broke the vase, The vase was broken by Kim, The vase Kim broke, It was Kim who broke
the vase, What Kim broke was the vase all have the same core meaning in the sense that there is no
situation or context in which one of them would be true and another false (assuming of course that we are
talking of the same Kim and the same vase). The first of them, Kim broke the vase, is the syntactically
most basic, while the others belong to various information-packaging constructions. The most
important of these constructions are illustrated by the underlined examples in [64]:

[64] Name Example Basic counterpart

i Preposing a. This one you can keep. b. You can keep this one.
ii Postposing a. I've lent to Jill the only copy b. I've lent the only copy that
that has been corrected. has been corrected to Jill.
iii Inversion a. In the bag was a gold watch. b. A gold watch was in the bag.
iv Passive a. The car was driven by Sue. b. Sue drove the car.
v Existential a. There was a doctor on board. b. A doctor was on board.
vi Extraposition a. It's clear that she is ill. b. That she is ill is clear.
vii Cleft a. It was Kim that suggested it. b. Kim suggested it.
viii Pseudo-cleft a. What I need is a cold drink. b. I need a cold drink.
ix Dislocation a. It's excellent, this curry. b. This curry is excellent.

In the first three we are concerned simply with the order of elements, while the others involve more
radical changes.
o The basic position for the Complement this one in [i] is after the verb, but in [a] it is preposed,
placed at the front of the clause.
o In [ii] the basic position for the Object, the only copy that has been corrected, is just after the verb
but long or complex elements like this can be postposed, placed at the end.
o In [iii] the positions of the Subject and Complement of the basic version [b] are reversed in the
inversion construction [a]. (More precisely, this is Subject-Dependent inversion, in contrast to the
Subject-auxiliary inversion construction discussed earlier. The Dependent is usually a Complement
but can also be an Adjunct, as in Three days later came news of her death.)
o In [iv] (the only one where the basic version has a distinct name, `active') the Object becomes
Subject, the Subject becomes Complement of by and the auxiliary be is added.
o The existential construction applies mainly with the verb be: the basic Subject is displaced to follow
the verb and the semantically empty pronoun there takes over the Subject function.
o In [vib] the Subject is a subordinate clause (that she is ill); in [a] this is extraposed, placed after the
verb phrase and this time the Subject function is taken over by the pronoun it.
o In [vii] the cleft clause is formed by dividing the basic version into two parts: one (Kim) is highlighted
by making it Complement of a clause with it as Subject and be as verb, while the other is
backgrounded by relegating it to a subordinate clause (a distinct subtype of relative clause).
o The pseudo-cleft construction is similar, but this time the subordinated part is put in a fused relative
(what I need) functioning as Subject of be.
o Dislocation belongs to fairly informal style. It differs from the basic version in having an extra noun
phrase, set apart intonationally and related to a pronoun in the main Subject-Predicate part of the
clause. In the left dislocation variant the pronoun occurs to the left of the noun phrase; in right
dislocation it is the other way round, as in His father, she can't stand him.

There are two further comments that should be made about these constructions.

(a) Basic counterpart need not be canonical. For convenience we have chosen examples in [64] where
the basic counterparts are all canonical clauses, but of course they do not need to be. The basic (active)
counterpart of passive Was the car driven by Kim? is Did Kim drive the car?, which is non-canonical by
virtue of being interrogative. Likewise the non-cleft counterpart of It was Sue who had been interviewed
by the police is Sue had been interviewed by the police, which is non-canonical by virtue of being
passive: note then that certain combinations of the information-packaging constructions are possible.

(b) The information-packaging construction may be the only option. The second point is that under certain
circumstances what one would expect to be the basic counterpart is in fact ungrammatical. Thus we can
say There was an accident, but not *An accident was: here the existential construction is the only option.
One difference between actives and passives is that the by phrase of the passive is an optional element
whereas the element that corresponds to it in the active, namely the Subject, is generally obligatory in
finite clauses. Compare, then:

[65] i Passive a. Some mistakes were made by Ed. b. Some mistakes were made.
ii Active a. Ed made some mistakes. b. *Made some mistakes.

Passives like [ib] - called short passives - thus have no active counterpart. They are in fact the more
common type of passive, allowing information to be omitted that would have to be expressed in the active
construction.

Syntax (by Edward J. Vajda)

Let us now move on to another major structural aspect of

language, syntax. The word syntax derives from the Greek
word syntaxis, which means arrangement. Morphology deals with
word formation out of morphemes; syntax deals with phrase and
sentence formation out of words.

What is a sentence?
Although everyone knows or thinks they know what a word is and
what a sentence is, both terms defy exact definition. The sentence
as a linguistic concept has been defined in over 200 different ways,
none of them completely adequate. Here are the most important
attempts at defining the sentence:

The traditional, or common sense definition states that a sentence is

a group of words that expresses a thought . The problem comes in
defining what a thought is. The phrase an egg expresses a thought
but is it a sentence? A sentence like I closed the door because it
was cold expresses two thoughts and yet it is one sentence.

Another definition is that a sentence is a group of words expressing

a topic (old information) and some comment (new information)
about that topic: John left. (Notice how intonation--which is a part
of phonology--interacts closely with syntax in delimiting topic from
comment--another example of the grammatical interconnectedness
of all the so called levels of language.) The problem with the topic-
comment definition is that many sentences have no clear topic and
comment structure: It's raining.

The grammatical definition of the sentence is the largest unit to

which syntactic rules can apply. In terms of syntactic categories,
most sentences--at least in English-- can be divided into
a subject and a predicate. This applies to sentences with or
without a clear topic/comment structure: John ---left. Many
sentences have no clear topic and comment structure: It--is raining.
(The word it here is the so-called dummy it used to fill the subject
slot for impersonal verbs in English; cf. prshí, snezí.)

Another problem with grammatical, or syntactic, definitions of the

sentence is that not all sentences--even in English--are divisible into
subject and predicate. Some sentence types make no internal
syntactic structure; there is no distinction between subject and
predicate:

a) Emotive sentences such as Gee! Wow. Darn! Yes! No!

b) Imperatives: Go! Leave! Taxi! All aboard! Down with alcohol!

c) Elliptic sentences: Who took the car? John.

d) small talk phrases: Hello. Good-bye. Good morning.

In polysynthetic languages the single word serve as a complete

sentence much more frequently. In such languages, morphology
rather than syntax usually expresses the distinction between subject
and predicate.

Types of sentences containing a subject and a predicate

Syntax usually examines sentences that have a clear inner division

into subject and predicate. There are 3 types of subject/predicate
structured sentences:

a) a simple sentence contains at least one subject and one

predicate: John read Pushkin.

b) a compound sentence is two or more simple sentences joined

into a single sentence: John read Pushkin and Mary read
Updike. Each simple sentence maintains its own internal syntactic
structure. They may be joined by a coordinating conjunction such
as and or or, or asyndetically (without a conjunction).

c) a complex sentence is a sentence in which one of the syntactic

roles is played by an embedded sentence: I made students read
Chomsky. The simple sentence students read Chomsky plays the
role of object of the verb made. Because the syntax of the two
parts of a complex sentence is intertwined, it is often not possible to
divide them into two free-standing simple sentences. *I
made. Students read Chomsky. I saw Mary run.

Complex sentences, then, are said to consist of a main clause,

with a subordinate clause imbedded into its structure (the
subordinate clause is often referred to as an imbedded
sentence). In phrase structure notation a subordinate clause, or
imbedded sentence, is notated as S', pronounced s-bar.

The word that connects a subordinate clause to a main clause, such

as the word that in the previous example, is known as a subordinate
conjunction; in syntactic analysis a subordinate conjunction is
known as a complementizer, and is notated as Comp. In some
English complex sentences the complementizer is optional, in others
obligatory: I know (that) you snore. vs. I hate when you snore (if
the complementizer has a temporal meaning it can't be left out.)

Parts of speech

Words and phrases can be grouped according to their sentence

building functions. Syntactic classes of words are traditionally
called parts of speech. English has the following parts of
speech: verb, noun, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition,
verbal particle (the off in turn off the light), article.

Note the following test to determine what is a preposition and what

is a verbal particle in English:

a). The mouse ran up the clock--Up the clock he ran. (Prepositional
phrases can be fronted).

b.) The man ran up a big bill.--*Up the big bill he ran. (Verbal
particles cannot.) Also: The mouse ran up it (pronoun is object of
the prep and can follow the preposition) but not *The mouse ran it
up. But, The man ran it up (pronoun is object of the verb and
follows the verb) not *The man ran up it.

Not all languages have the same parts of speech. Many languages
have postpositions rather than prepositions, like Georgian skolashi,
to school; skoladan, from school. Serbo-Croatian, Slovak and many
other languages have clitics (clitics are affixes attached to phrases
instead of single words). Dal som knigu prijatel'ovi/ Knigu som dal
prijatel'ovi/ Prijatel'ovi som dal knigu. I gave it to my
friend. Spanish uses the object marking clitics le and lo after
verbs: Dice mi lo.

A common assertion is that all languages have at least nouns and

verbs. It is true that all languages have some means of conveying
information as a concept or as an event, but what a noun or verb is
differs from language to language. In the Salishan languages of the
Puget Sound, a single word can be translated into English
as village and a village exist or there is a village; in other words,
morphemes denoting stationary concepts are often bound roots that
require verbal affixes to stand as words. So parts of speech--even
nouns and verbs-- turn out to be at best fuzzy categories across
languages, not identical or even present in every language. Some
people thing of parts of speech or grammatical categories as similar
to protons, electrons and neutrons in how they contribute to the
structure of languages, but such is not the case. The form/meaning
connections differ from language to language. There are universal
tendencies, but these do not seem to be absolute universal
properties.

Parts of speech are based on syntactic function, not concrete, extra-

linguistic meaning. Notice that words is different syntactic classes
can have the same concrete meaning and differ only in their ability
to combine with other words: The sky darkens, the darkening of
the sky, a dark sky, the darkness of the sky.

Thus syntactic patterns as well as syntactic categories cannot be

said to be limited to any concrete real-world meaning; they are
linguistic structures relevant for expressing meaning and yet have
no specific meaning of their own. Note Chomsky's famous
semantically anomalous statement: Colorless green ideas sleep
furiously. This sentence is utter nonsense but it is nonsense stated
in English and conforms perfectly to a complex set rules of English
syntax; thus one is tempted to devise a surrealist interpretation of
it. The utterance *green sleep colorless furiously ideas is not a
sentence of English at all and even the most imaginative person
could not devise a meaning for it.

Syntactic atoms

The basic unit of syntax is not the word, but the syntactic atom,
defined as a structure that fulfills a basic syntactic function.
Syntactic atoms may be either a single word or a phrase that fulfills
a single syntactic function.

Fido ate the bone.

The dog ate the bone.

The big yellow dog ate the bone.

Our dog that we raised from a puppy ate the bone.

Elements with syntactic equivalence all belong to the same type of

syntactic atom (NP, VP)

A language also contains specific rules for properly connecting

syntactic atoms to form sentences--these are called phrase
structure rules (look at problem 5 on page 116). The
sentence: The big yellow dog ate the bone. is well formed because it
uses the parts of speech in a way that conforms to the rules of
English syntax. The string of words: big the ate bone dog yellow
the, is not a sentence because it violates syntactic rules. It is often
not even possible to assign any meaning to a syntactically ill-formed
utterance.

This is why the syntactic rules of a language can be followed

perfectly to produce illogical or semantically highly improbable
sentences: The bone ate the big yellow dog. Since a new context
could be imagined to render such a statement at least fictionally
logical, it is fortunate that our language has a ready made means of
expressing it. The fact that syntactic structures are not restricted in
the meanings they may express is one reason why we can so easily
produce novel sentences never before heard. The semantic
independence of the phrase structure rules is one of the main
factors that provides for the infinite creativity of human language.
Animal systems don't have any structural units that are meaningful
yet totally independent of meaning.

Syntactic Relations and phrase structure rules

Let's examine syntactic relations within English sentences. One

approach is to divide the words of a sentence into phrases (defined
as words closely associated with one another syntactically). This
technique is know as parsing. The most fundamental division is
between subject and predicate. (of course, this is because we are
cheating and ignoring sentence types that lack this
division). Phrases containing different parts of speech can serve
one and the same function.
The big yellow dog //ate /bones

He //ate the old bone.

The big yellow dog //slept.

The dog //growled at John.

Each of these sentences consists of a subject and a predicate. But

in each sentence different syntactic types of words or combinations
of words constitute subject and predicate. Different combinations of
parts of speech fulfilling the same syntactic function are said to
be syntactically equivalent. It is possible to write rules
describing syntactic equivalence. These rules are called phrase
structure rules. These rules use special symbols designed
exclusively for syntactic descriptions. Grammatical terms or graphic
notation devices devised to describe language structure are
examples of meta-language, defined roughly as language about
language. The syntactic metalanguage used in writing phrase
structure rules involves mainly abbreviations from English words for
parts of speech.

S--> NP VP A sentence consists of a noun phrase and a verb

phrase. (These correspond to subject and predicate.)

NP--> (art) (adj) N or NP --> pronoun

(Go over exercise 5 on page116 in the textbook.)

Phrase structure rules are said to be recursive. That is, identical

elements in the structure of a phrase can repeat. These repeating
elements are sometimes known as parallel items in a series:

Parallel subjects: the sentence John came--John, Bill, and Mary

came. is a simple sentence with a recursive
subject. (Compare John came and Bill camewhich is a compound
sentence each part of which has a simple subject.)

Parallel verbs: Caesar came, saw, and conquered.

Parallel modifiers:
adverbs: a very good book--a very, very good book;
or

adjectives: a green and red and pink and blue book.

Parallel compound sentences:I came and Bill came and Mary came
and...

Multiple subordinate clauses in a complex sentence: I know an old

lady who swallowed a fly which was chased by her cat who had
been bored because there was nothing to do in the house that Jack
built when he. . .

Remember the ability of syntactic elements to occur in multiples is

known as recursion.

It is possible to write an entire book consisting of just one single

recursive complex sentence. The property of recursion means that
it is impossible to propose limits on the length of sentences. No one
will ever be able to state with certainty what the longest possible
sentence can be. There are a limited number of words in each
language, but a potentially infinite number of sentences. This
realization prompted 19th century German linguist Wilhelm von
Humboldt to say: "Language makes infinite use of finite
means." Such a statement could not be made about animal
systems of communication, in which the number of messages is
strictly limited.

The syntax/morphology interface/ Day two

1) The syntactic atom is the basic unit of syntax; syntactic

structures are made up of other syntactic structures; although
syntax is separate from meaning (we can have syntactically correct
sentences which are utterly anomalous semantically, it is not
possible to separate syntax from morphology compeletely: there are
some instances where specific phrase structure rules are
constrained semantically, for instance in VP = V +
NP (Subcategorization rules for verbal complements).
 Let's take a closer look at verb phrases, which are more
complex than noun phrases. First of all, VP can = a single verb
(V) He ate; or the verb may have an auxillary (aux): He was eating,
He has eaten; or the verb clause might contain verb + dependent
words. There are several types of verb-dependent words, known
collectively as verbal complements: He ate yesterday (Adv); He ate
meat (NP); He ate in the cafe. (PP) Object noun phrases,
prepositional phrases, and adverbs all fulfill the same syntactic
function--the verb complement. (Yesterday we noted that in
language typology the complement is notated as O.

The noun phrase complements of action verbs are called direct

objects: He kicked the ball. Verbs that can take a direct object
are called transitive verbs. Some transitive verbs are obligatorily
transitive: that is, they cannot be used without a complement: *He
made. Other transitive verbs may omit the object: I writevs. I write
a letter.

Verbs that cannot take a direct object at all are

called intransitive. For instance, the verb sleep cannot take a
direct object complement: He slept (yesterday, at home), but not
* He slept a fish.

The complements of linking verbs are called predicate

nominals, which may be either nouns or adjectives: John arrived
healthy. We became ill.

Sometimes the same verb can have two different meanings,

one requiring a direct object, the other a predicate nominal: We
smelled the roses. The chef made (created) a good salad. vs. The
roses smelled good. He made (became) a good chef.

The study of what grammatical form may or may not be used

after a verb is called verb government. It is also known
as lexical subcategorization, the point being that it is not enough
to know the meaning of a word and what part of speech the word
belongs to. One must also know additional requirements about how
the word may or must combine with other words in a phrase.
 Mention that in polysynthetic languages this is part of
morphology. (There is no clear division between morphology and
syntax that can be drawn across all languages.) The division
between syntax and morphology varies across languages.

Phrases and heads

Since they cannot be defined as having specific meanings,

syntactic atoms (single words or whole phrases) are defined by how
they interact with syntactic rules.

1) They do not allow reordering of their constituents, It's the bone

the dog ate. The bone, he ate it. (cleft sentences and sentences
with left dislocation). You can't front only part of a syntactic atom
any more than you can change the order of morphemes in a word
rewrite but not *write-re: *The big, he ate the bone. (NOTE: When
used as examples, grammatically ill formed sentences and words
are traditionally marked by an asterisk *. This also applies to
morphologically ill formed words: *ingrun, *runre.)

2) One may not anaphorize, or substitute for, only a part of a

morphologically complex syntactic atom (I like the tea's flavor. I like
its flavor. Here is coffee and here is a coffeepot I like its pot.)

3) Also, if a morphologically complex syntactic atom takes

inflectional endings, then only the head can be so modified, not any
of the subordinate constituents. (Workaholic--workaholiclike,
*workedaholic, *workingaholic.)

The head of a syntactic atom can sometimes be a zero

morpheme: withstand, grandstand, leaf--> maple leaf Toronto
Maple Leafs, fly--> fly out (a window), a fly ball--to fly out (in
baseball) He flied out.

Notice that noun phrases often have internal rules. English noun
phrases observe a strict word order: article, adverb, adjective,
noun. Noun phrase structure rules differ from language to
language: In French, Hawaiian, and many other language the
adjectives come after the noun. In many languages the form of
articles or adjectives changes to reflect the gender of the
noun. When words in a phrase change grammatically to
accommodate one another the process is
called concord or agreement. French is a good example: le petit
garcon vs. la petite fille; German: das Haus; der Apfel; die Blume.
In such cases we say that the noun is the head of the phrase, since
it causes other words to change and yet remains unaffected by
whatever adjective or article is added to it. In English, the head of
the syntactic unit called the sentence is the subject NP, since the
verb agrees with it and not the other way around. Each syntactic
atom has its head.

Diagramming sentences, how to deal with ambiguity

Let's now turn to instances of ambiguity in syntax. Sometimes a

sentence or phrase allows for two different syntactic interpretations.

Parsing using parentheses to show syntactic relations can

disambiguate such a phrase as: old men and women

Other sentences do not lend themselves to such a linear

approach. Sometimes the words that belong to the same syntactic
unit are separated by other words: The book that was lying under
all the other books is the most interesting. Tree diagrams can be
used to show such "long distance" grammatical relations.

Consider also the sentence The fish is too old to eat. Here, parsing
and even tree diagramming cannot separate out the two potential
meanings. In such cases of semantic ambiguity, paraphrases can
be used to express two meanings hidden in a single linear form:

The fish is too old for the fish to eat. The fish is too old to be eaten.

Noam Chomsky, a linguist at MIT, became interested in the

phenomenon of syntactic ambiguity. He noticed that languages
contain systematic ways of paraphrasing sentences:

a.) Active sentences can regularly be turned into passives: The boy
kicked the ball.--> the ball was kicked by the boy. (passive
transformation)
b.) Statements can be regularly turned into questions: He is
there? Is he there? (interrogative transformation)

He came to believe that such parallel syntactic means of expressing

the same meaning were simply surface manifestations of deeper
structural units of language. To study and describe such deep
structures, he devised the theory of transformational
grammar. The three main tenets of this theory are:

1) The surface forms of a language are reducible to a limited

number of deep structures. The same deep structure is manifested
in several different ways in actual sentences. This is similar to the
use of the principle of allomorphs to describe morpheme variants.

2) These deep structures are universal--in other words, the same

for all languages of the world; only the rules for deriving the surface
forms from the deep structures differ from language to language.

3) The reason these deep structures are universal is that they are
inborn, part of the human genetic code; being inborn they help
children discover the surface forms of language so quickly.

Transformational grammar has maintained its popularity since 1957

when Noam Chomsky published his first book, Syntactic
Structures. But major problems continue to dog the theory. The
main problems are:

Transformational rules only work for sentences composed of

separate noun and verb phrases. We have seen that not all
sentences are of this type.

Mainly English data was used to find these supposedly universal

deep structures. Usually one of the paraphrases is taken as the
basic one and the other derived from it: cf. active and passive. But
active is not more basic in all languages; Japanese uses the passive
as its more basic form.

No deep structures have been described that would apply across all
languages. Structural universals tend to be proposed, then
disgarded as data from new languages disprove them. There seem
to be universal tendencies in syntax, but no universal has yet been
proven to exist that would be more specific than the general
creativity in humans.

Thus, no real progress has been made in writing a universal

grammar that would be applicable to all human languages, a sort of
In chemistry we have the Periodic table of Elements--all substances
on earth can be seen as compounds of a finite set of
elements. Human language doesn't seem to work this way, and no
such table of universal grammar elements has been found.

Definitions of Grammar

Since sentence formation is the most obvious and frequent

manifestation of creativity in any language, the syntactic rules of a
language are often referred to as the grammar of the language. But
morphology and phonology are also part of the grammar in that
they, too, are creative tools.

Here it might be pertinent to mention a few other definitions of the

term grammar that are widely used.

a) A descriptive grammar is a description of the structure of a

language in all its aspects--morphology, syntax, phonology--which
attempts do portray the language as accurately as possible in terms
of how it is naturally used by speakers.

b) A prescriptive grammar is a description of a language which

assigns value judgments to competing ways native speakers use in
forming words or sentences. Prescriptive grammars do not attempt
to describe the language as it is naturally spoken, but rather to tell
the speakers how they best should speak it.

c) A third type, grammars of foreign languages written for

second language learners fall in between the other two types. They
represent attempts to describe a language as it is spoken by natives
in order to tell non-natives how to speak it.

When thinking of grammar in the general, descriptive sense,

remember that there is no absolute division between syntax,
morphology, and phonology. Even in the same language these so
called levels of language are not completely separate.

It is not always possible to separate phonology from syntax. For

instance, certain phonological rules depend on syntax. Look at
these examples from fast speech: What are you doing? where are =
an auxiliary verb, becomes Whacha doin? But What are
you? where are = the main verb of the predicate, can't be run
together as *Whacha? Similarly, I'm going to work now. (in the
sense of I am planning to work now)--> I'm gonna work
now. But I'm going to work now in the sense of setting out for
work, can't be contracted. The phonetic environment is the same;
but syntactic class the words belong to affect which of them can and
cannot be contracted.

Morphology and syntax also interact, as we have seen. Compound

words are part of morphology, yet they are dependent on syntactic
parameters, as well. Compound words or adj/noun combinations
that act as single words can express different syntactic
functions. One must understand these underlying syntactic
functions to understand the meaning of the words: magnifying
glass, falling star vs. looking glass, laughing gas.

The difficulty of completely separating morphology, syntax, and

phonology is especially evident when comparing different
languages. What in one language is a part of syntax in another
language will be a part of morphology, a fact particularly evident
when comparing analytic languages like Chinese to polysynthetic
languages like Eskimo.
 Improving Your Sentence Structure

To improve your academic writing skills, you must first understand possible problems with sentence structure so that you
can not only recognize but write effective sentences.

To understand sentences, you must first understand clauses, which make up sentences. A clause is defined as a group of
words containing both a subject and a verb.

Clauses can be independent or dependent.

 An independent clause contains both a subject and a verb and can stand alone as a sentence.
 A dependent clause contains both a subject and a verb, but cannot stand alone as a sentence.
Dependent clauses are introduced by subordinating conjunctions such as because, that, what, while, who, which,
although, if, etc.

Kinds of Sentences
There are three kinds of sentences:

1. SIMPLE: A simple sentence consists of one main (or independent) clause. To be complete, a simple sentence must have
at least one SUBJECT and one 'verb'.
Example:
The MAN 'went' to the store.
A simple sentence may also have a compound subject and/or a compound verb.
Example:
The MAN and his SON 'went' to the store and 'bought' some milk.
2. COMPOUND: A compound sentence has at least two main (or independent) clauses, connected by coordinating
conjunctions (such as and, but, or, nor, for, so, yet). Each clause has its own subject(s) and verb(s). The second clause
should be separated from the first by a comma in front of the coordinating conjunction.
Example:
The man went to the store, and the sales clerk sold him some milk.
3. COMPLEX: A complex sentence has one main (or independent) clause and one or more dependent (or subordinate)
clauses.
Example:
When an atom is split, it releases neutrons.

Dependent clauses can function in the sentence as nouns, adjectives or adverbs:

 NOUN CLAUSES function as nouns in the sentence and can be used as subjects, objects, predicate nominatives, and
objects of prepositions.
Example:
WHAT IS MOST IMPORTANT TO HIM is his family. (subject) That critic writes THAT AL PURDY IS THE BEST POET IN
CANADA. (object)
You are WHAT YOU EAT. (predicate nominative)
She is very suspicious about WHAT HE SAID. (object of preposition about)

 ADJECTIVE CLAUSES start with a relative pronoun( such as who, which, or that) and function as adjectives.
The pronoun refers to a noun that usually precedes it directly.
Example:
The woman WHO BOUGHT THE RED DRESS is my aunt. That dress, WHICH IS MY FAVOURITE, was expensive. The
problem THAT HE SOLVED was a difficult one.

NOTE: Use commas around the adjective clause to indicate that the information there is not essential to the sentence, i.e.,
not needed to identify the subject (see Improving Your Punctuation).
Absence of commas, on the other hand, indicates the information is essential to the sentence.
Example:
The bull that is in the pasture belongs to Joe. (suggests that, of all the other bulls on the farm, the one in the pasture is
being identified as belonging to Joe)

OR

The bull, which is in the pasture, belongs to Joe. (suggests that there is only one bull on the farm, so the writer is giving
non-essential information by mentioning that it is in the pasture)

NOTE: The word THAT is used to introduce an essential clause (without commas), whereas WHICH is used to introduce
a non-essential clause (with commas). Some grammar textbooks suggest WHICH can be used for either essential or non-
essential clauses.
NOTE: A pronoun (such as which, that) must always refer specifically to one noun. The word WHICH is often used
incorrectly.
Example:
NO:
Your essays should be submitted on time, WHICH is one way to be a successful student.
(Vague reference because the word which in this sentence refers to neither time nor essays.)
YES:
One way for you to be successful as a student is to submit your essays on time.

 ADVERB CLAUSES function as adverbs in the sentence, modifying verbs, adjectives, or adverbs. They may tell how, why,
when, where, etc.
Conjunctions used include although, after, if, because, while, since, whether, etc.
Example:
WHEN I ARRIVED AT THE UNIVERSITY, classes had already started.
Stan is happy BECAUSE HE RECEIVED A GOOD GRADE ON HIS HISTORY MIDTERM.
ALTHOUGH BOB IS INTELLIGENT, he doesn’t work very hard.

Problems with Sentences

1. Sentence Fragments

A sentence fragment is not a complete sentence. It usually lacks either a subject or a verb, or both, or contains only a
dependent clause.
Example:
 For example, three dogs and a goat. (no verb – what did the animals do?)
Studying too hard on weekends. (no subject – who was studying?)
Because I couldn’t find my shoes. (contains a subject and verb, but is a dependent clause)

2. Run-on Sentences: Fused Sentences and Comma Splices

A run-on sentence is one in which two or more independent clauses are inappropriately joined. Remember that the length
of a sentence does not determine whether it is a run-on sentence: a sentence that is correctly punctuated and correctly
joined can be extremely long. Two types of run-on sentences are fused sentences and sentences with comma splice errors.

 In a fused sentence, clauses run into each other with no punctuation.

Example:
The experiment failed it had been left unobserved for too long.

 A comma splice refers to the error of placing only a comma between two complete sentences, without a connecting
word (such as and, but, or because).
Example:
The experiment failed, it had been left unobserved for too long.

To correct a fused sentence or a comma splice error, you can use either a period, semi-colon, colon, coordinating
conjunction, or subordinating conjunction.
Example:

The experiment failed. It had been left unobserved for too long.
The experiment failed; it had been left unobserved for too long.
The experiment failed: it had been left unobserved for too long.
The experiment had been left unobserved for too long, SO it failed.
The experiment failed BECAUSE it had been left unobserved for too long.

 A comma splice also occurs when commas are used before conjunctive adverbs (therefore, however, nevertheless,
moreover, etc.) connecting two sentences.
Example:
NO:
The experiment had been left unobserved for too long, therefore it failed.
YES:
The experiment had been left unobserved for too long; therefore, it failed.
YES:
He wasn’t prepared to defend a client who was guilty; however, he could be persuaded to accept a bribe.

NOTE: When the conjunctive adverb is within the clause rather than at the beginning, place it between commas.
Example:
He wasn’t prepared to defend a client who was guilty; he could be persuaded, however, to accept a bribe.

3. Loose Sentences

 A loose sentence may result if you use too many “and ” connectives when other conjunctions would convey a more
precise meaning.
Example:
John had a weight problem, and he dropped out of school. (what is the most accurate connection: John had a weight
problem so he dropped out of school or because he dropped out of school?)
 A loose sentence also results from weak sentence construction and the inclusion of many phrases and clauses in no
particular order.
Example:
In the event that we get the contract, we must be ready by June 1 with the necessary personnel and equipment to get
the job done, so with this end in mind a staff meeting, which all group managers are expected to attend, is scheduled for
February 12.

NOTE: Writing the previous passage as several sentences would be more effective.

4. Choppy Sentences

A succession of short sentences, without transitions to link them to each other, results in choppy sentences.
Example:

NO:
Our results were inconsistent. The program obviously contains an error. We need to talk to Paul Davis. We will ask him to
review the program.
YES:
We will ask Paul Davis to review the program because it produced inconsistent results.

5. Excessive Subordination

Excessive subordination is not an effective substitute for choppiness.

Example:

NO:
Doug thought that he was prepared but he failed the examination which meant that he had to repeat the course before he
could graduate which he didn’t want to do because it would conflict with his summer job.
YES:
Doug thought that he was prepared, but he failed the examination. Therefore, he would have to repeat the course before he
could graduate. He did not want to do that because it would conflict with his summer job.

6. Parallel Structure

Parts of a sentence which are in sequence must all follow the same grammatical or structural principle.
Example:

NO:
I like to swim, to sail, and rowing.
YES:
I like to swim, to sail, and to row.
YES:
I like swimming, sailing, and rowing.
NO:
This report is an overview of the processes involved, the problems encountered, and how they were solved.
YES:
This report is an overview of the processes involved, the problems encountered, and the solutions devised.

Today's Building Hours

Tuesday, January 16th: 8am - 2am

 All service hours

Grammar & Style

 Improving Your Grammar

 Improving Your Punctuation

 Improving Your Sentence Structure

 Improving Your Style

 Improving Your Writing

 Using Quotations in Your Essay