Chapter 3 English | Constituent StructureSYNTAX fe have seen that the linguist seeks to identify and list the = morphemes of a language, to determine which are roots and which are affixes. He then classifies the roots as bound or free, the affixes as prefixes or suffixes, and the suffixes as (7 — derivational or inflectional. All these tasks belong to the process of compiling a dictionary. We may now ask: does a dictionary of English fully account for its structure and function? Think of your experi- ence studying a foreign language or traveling abroad; does a knowledge of the vocabulary of a language or possession of a bilingual dictionary make it possible to use the language the way the natives do? It does not. We will now begin finding out why it does not. Read aloud and compare the two sequences of English words in 3.1. Notice that both sequences contain the same words. 3.1a mornings the in beautiful most are mountains the b the mountains are most beautiful in the mornings If you listened closely enough to your own reading, or if you now ask someone else to read the sequences aloud, you will notice that 3.la reads like a list: the words are pronounced on a continuing monotone and perhaps with slight pauses between them. However, in reading 3.1b, the pitch of the voice rises and falls on the last word, and there are no pauses between the words. You might at this point want to say, “Of course! That's because 3.1b is a sentence and 3.lais not.” But let me risk belaboring the obvious, hoping to give some initial insight into just what a sentence is. When a user of English hears 3.1b, he does not just think of the dictionary meanings of moxntains and beautiful; he also associates the beauty with the mountains. No such association is conveyed in 3.1a. 46ENGLISH CONSTITUENT STRUCTURE 47 Furthermore, this association in 3.1b is limited to a specific period of time, mornings. In 3.1a, mornings bears no such relation to any other word or group of words in the sequence. The obvious observation is that the English language conveys meaning not only by using words, which are composed of meaningful morphemes, but by ordering them in a meaningful way. We can isolate and observe these principles of order more clearly by examining the following sequence, composed partly of English mor- phemes and partly of italicized nonsense syllables. 3.2. it was pabious and the bepty orines marned and surdled in the dop The italicized syllables, because they are not English morphemes and would not be entered in an English dictionary, are by definition mean- ingless segments. But if we read this string as if it were an English sen- tence, thereby evoking the ordering principles of English, then these meaningless segments begin to take on meaning imposed on them by the context. A naive user of English, given this sequence to read, might in fact assume that the underlined segments are meaningful, but that he must look them up. But even before he goes to his dictionary, he already knows that marn and surdle are verbs. He knows this because they carry a verb suffix, the past tense inflection, and because their position in the string after the nouns and before the prepositional phrase is a position where verbs tend to occur in English. He knows that the words begin- ning pab and bept are probably adjectives because of their positions in the sequence relative to other words and because they carry adjectival derivational suffixes. He will infer that dop is a noun because of its posi- tion at the end of the sequence after the; but he will probably also infer that it specifies a place because it is in a prepositional phrase introduced by iz. ‘The facts in the previous paragraph lead to this generalization: when English words are strung together according to certain ordering prin- ciples, meaning is conveyed by the ordering that is not contained in the glosses of the individual words in isolation. The linguist’s description and explanation of these principles is termed syntax. This chapter and the next five chapters examine English syntax in some detail. FORM CLASSES Any attempt to describe English syntax must show why 3.la and countless sequences of English words like it are not English sentences, and why 3.1b and countless other sequences are English sentences. We could suggest that a description of English syntax might resemble the