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Volume I
ENGLISH
GRAMMAR
A FUNCTION-BASED INTRODUCTION
Volume I
T. GIVÓN
Linguistics Department
University of Oregon
1993
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 75577 · 1070 AN Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · 821 Bethlehem Pike · Philadelphia, PA 19118 · USA
The author with Prof. Bolinger, Christmas 1987
IN MEMORIAM
Dwight Bolinger,
generous teacher,
thoughtful friend,
lover of language.
CONTENTS
Foreword xix
1. INTRODUCTION 1
1.1. Grammar and communication 1
1.1.1. Structure vs. function 1
1.1.2. Arbitrary vs. motivated rules of grammar 2
1.1.3. Rules of grammar vs. communicative strategies 3
1.1.4. Cross-language diversity of grammatical strategies 4
1.2. Whose grammar? 5
1.2.1. Prescriptive vs. descriptive grammars 5
1.2.2. Historic time 8
1.2.3. Age: The grammar of youth 9
1.2.4. Spoken vs. written language 13
1.2.5. Educated vs. uneducated grammar 15
1.2.6. Formal vs. informal grammar 17
1.2.7. Grammar and social status 17
1.2.8. Grammar and ethnic minorities 18
1.2.9. Geographical dialects 19
1.2.10. Grammar and foreign talk 19
1.2.11. Grammar and individual style 20
1.3. Grammar for communication 21
1.3.1. Major functions of language 21
1.3.2. Words, clauses, discourse 21
1.3.3. Grammar as a communicative code 25
1.3.3.1. Joint coding 25
1.3.3.2. Coding devices in syntax 26
1.4. Theme and variation in syntactic description 27
1.5. Parsing: tree diagrams 28
1.6. Deep structure, surface structure and meaning 30
Notes 37
χ CONTENTS
2.4.7. Adverbs 71
2.4.7.1. Preamble 71
2.4.7.2. Manner adverbs 71
2.4.7.3. Time, frequency or aspectuality adverbs 73
2.4.7.4. Epistemic adverbs 74
2.4.7.5. Evaluative adverbs 75
2.4.7.6. Adverbs modifying adjectives 76
2.4.7.7. Emphatic adverbs 77
2.5. Minor word classes 77
2.5.1. Preamble 77
2.5.2. Prepositions 77
2.5.3. Inter-clausal connectives 78
2.5.3.1. Conjunctions 77
2.5.3.2. Subordinators 78
2.5.4. Pronouns 79
2.5.5. Determiners 80
2.5.5.1. Articles 80
2.5.5.2. Demonstratives 80
2.5.5.3. Possessor pronouns 81
2.5.6. Quantifiers 81
2.5.7. Numerals 81
2.5.8. Ordinals 81
2.5.9. Auxiliaries 81
2.5.10. Interjections 81
Notes 84
Bibliography 303
Index 311
FOREWORD
*) Cited by D. Blum, "Going to the Core", The New Yorker, 6-29-92, p. 54.
XX FOREWORD
This book is intended for both students and teachers, at both the high-
school and college level, for both native and non-native speakers. With the
guidance of a teacher, it can serve as the student's introduction to the gram
mar of (written) English. Put another way, it is an introduction to grammar
as a means for producing coherent text. Like all introductions, it is selective
and incomplete. The grammar of any language is a huge living organism, it
cannot be exhaustively described in ten lifetimes. One has to tease apart the
more systematic core from the still-evolving and sometime chaotic
periphery. And one can only hope then that this introduction to the core
will stimulate the reader to seek the outer reaches.
Aiming this book at the teaching of English Grammar to both native
and non-native speakers is a deliberate move. In spite of striking differ
ences in prior linguistic background, the native and non-native speaker face
a similar task in acquiring written, literate English: neither can claim writ
ten English as their native language. To the native speaker it is his/her first
second language, a language whose grammar is starkly different from that
of the spoken language learned first at home. Much like the transition from
spoken sounds to a written alphabet, the transition from spoken to written
grammar is a profound transformation. It jars the mind's old habits and
demands conscious reflection upon the nature of two conflicting sets of
skills. The first, face-to-face oral communication, is a native skill supported
by half a million years of bio-cultural evolution. The second, written
expression, is an acquired skill of a relatively recent vintage. By acquiring a
written language we become bilingual; and bilingualism demands careful
discrimination between the two contexts that go with the two sets of skills.
In the course of learning, the non-native speaker indeed produces "er
rors". The native speaker, on the other hand, produces only "inappropriate
contextual choices". Still, in the course of both types of learning, the goal of
deliberate instruction is not to eradicate all vestiges of older linguistic
habits. Wise grammar instruction teaches, in both instances, a new set of
communicative skills, segregating them carefully from the older, native
skills. The student is then left with two sets of linguistic behaviors. Both are
useful, both are valid, but they apply in mutually exclusive contexts.
The approach to descriptive grammar I have pursued here owes much
to many illustrious antecedents, beginning with the late Otto Jespersen. It
owes much to many who are still with us, such as Michael Halliday and Bob
Longacre. And it owes even more to many of my own contemporaries and
close associates, such as Wally Chafe, Bernard Comrie, Bob Dixon, John
PREFACE xxi
Haiman, Paul Hopper, Ron Langacker, Gillian Sankoff, Dan Slobin and
Sandy Thompson. The list of people I've been fortunate to learn from is
much too long to recite here in its entirety; but special gratitude is due to
John Haiman for reading doggedly through the entire manuscript and
criticizing it unsparingly. Te absolvo, Janos.
In all fairness, I must also acknowledge my great indebtedness to a
man whose approach to grammar I have rejected long ago, Noam
Chomsky. However far apart our paths may have meandered, his presence
loomed large over my early awakening to the undeniable mental reality of
grammar, and to the fact that in language — as in music — form really mat
tered.
My guardian angel in the study of grammar has always been Dwight
Bolinger, to whose memory this book is dedicated. Dwight's great acuity,
critical reflection, profound scholarship, penetrating insight, inimitable
light touch, and above all his all-consuming love for language and grammar,
have been an inspiration to me, a beacon whose shining light I only hope to
dimly reflect. In his early, steadfast and often lonely insistence that form
must be studied together with meaning, that grammar made sense, and that
the forms of language were about the expression of thought, Dwight was
the most generous teacher and thoughtful critic a young upstart could possi
bly hope to find. The many faults that are still evident in this book would
have perhaps been fewer if Dwight had been able, as was his original intent,
to read through the manuscript. Like many of my generation, I have been
orphaned. I hope some day to be worthy of Dwight's faith.
Eugene, Oregon
June, 1992
1 INTRODUCTION
of the machine, or how the structure came to be what it is. When one
teaches grammar, therefore, one can safely ignore its function, and make
reference only to parts of the grammar machine.
One can indeed describe real machines in such a way, ones that have
been constructed for a purpose, say a car. The fact that the power-train is
designed to make the wheels spin, that the transmission modulates the tor
que while transmitting power to the wheels, that the wheels spin to move
the car, and that the whole car is designed for transportation, are irrelevant
from such a perspective.
An altogether different analogy for grammar is that of a biological
organism. Within the organism, various anatomical structures perform dis
tinct physiological functions. The structural design is adapted through pro
tracted evolution to perform specific functions. In biology, the study of
structure would be meaningless without the parallel study of function. This
has been an implicit tenet of biological scholarship ever since Aristotle, the
founder of biology, who first proposed to view the design of organisms by
analogy with purposeful tools:
"...If a piece of wood is to be split with an axe, the axe must of necessity
be hard; and if hard, it must of necessity be made of iron or bronze. Now
exactly in the same way the body, which like the axe is an instrument— for
both the body as a whole and its several parts individually have definite
operations for which they are made; just in the same way, I say, the body
if it is to do its work, must of necessity be of such and such character..."
("De Partibus Animalium", in McKeon, ed., 1941:647)
The same perspective may be found in a recent standard text on human
anatomy:
"...Anatomy is the science that deals with the structure of the
body...physiology is defined as the science of function. Anatomy and
physiology have more meaning when studied together..."
(Crouch, Functional Human Anatomy, 1978, pp. 9-10)
And it is the same perspective adopted in this book, one of assuming that
human language is a purposeful instrument designed to code and communi
cate information, and that like other instruments, its structure is not
divorced from its function.
1.1.2. Arbitrary vs. motivated rules of grammar
By saying that rules of grammar are not arbitrary, one need not ignore
the fact that occasionally a rule — in a particular language at a particular
INTRODUCTION 3
time — indeed turns out to be arbitrary. That is, the rule seems com
municatively opaque, non-functional; it does not make sense. Situations of
this type are almost always due to the cumulative effect of historical
change: An erstwhile communicatively transparent rule of grammar has,
due to the conflation of several historical changes over time, become
bizarre, fossilized, counter-communicative. Such cases indeed exist, but
they constitute a minority of the bulk of the extant rules of a grammar at
any given time. 1
Here again, a biological analogy is instructive. In the anatomy of every
organism one finds a certain proportion of vestigial organs that have lost
their function altogether. In other instances, organs undergo functional re
assignment, over time losing their original function but gaining a new one.
When this re-assignment is relatively recent, the structural design of an
organ may reflect more naturally its original function than its current func
tion. 2 In almost all cases, such a mismatch between structure and function
is due to multi-step evolution. Evolutionary change in biological design is
the analog of historical change in linguistic structure.
A good example of communicatively opaque rules of grammar in Eng
lish are nouns with irregular plurals and verbs with irregular past tense
forms. Both reflect the tail end of massive re-analysis in the grammar of a
Germanic language. In the course of this re-analysis, previously coherent
rules have deteriorated over time and have become largely incoherent.
They are being gradually eliminated from the grammar; and it is perhaps a
matter of time before they have disappeared altogether. 3
1.1.3. Rules of grammar vs. communicative strategies
The laws of Newtonian physics are considered exceptionless. Often,
rules of grammar seem equally rigid, so much so that the unwary may be
tempted to view them as the workings of a deterministic automaton. On
closer analysis, many — perhaps the bulk of— the rules in a grammar turn
out to be considerably more flexible. Their flexibility may be understood in
several senses. First, the range of contexts to which a rule applies is not a
rigidly defined population. Rather, the bulk of the cases — the run-of-the-
mill typical instances — either clearly abide or clearly do not abide by the
rule. But a significant if small minority of cases also exists, who fall some
where in the middle. That is, the application or non-application of the rule
in such cases is a matter of more subtle judgement and — most important
— is often a matter of degree. In such cases, a more detailed examination
4 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
seems, everybody with a sharp pen and strong opinions is a rightful, wrath
ful expert. For example, a well-known columnist has been fulminating with
equal venom against the following lapses of English grammar: 7
(1) a. "...In order for your child to receive credit for this assign
ment, they must turn in a signed copy..."
b. "...Sally, he said, good grammar never made me no dol
lars..."
c. "...whom beats who in the Seattle Kingdome this
weekend..."
d. "...Twenty years of teaching taught my husband and I the
value of field trips..."
e. "...coverage of Monday night football has not been discussed
between Dennis and /..."
f. "...he's a lot older than her, but so what?..."
Example (la) is an entrenched creative innovation in the spoken language,
adapting the third person plural 'they' to a new use as a gender-neutral pro
noun. 8 Example (lb) is correct for the spoken, informal English of perhaps
75% of Americans. Example (1c) represents hyper-correction by speakers
for whom the form 'whom' has ceased to exist, and 'who' is used to mark
both subject and object (again probably the vast majority of American
speakers). Examples (ld,e) represent the current fluctuation of the rule
about subject vs. object pronoun form following the conjunction 'and'. And
example (1f) represents the largely finished re-analysis of a similar case, in
the speech of all but a recalcitrant minority of older speakers.
The same columnist, in a saner mood, points out to where rules of
grammar are really useful, namely in insuring coherent communication.
The usages he pans this time are indeed disruptive:9
(2) a. "...Lawyer accused of lying to fly..."
b. "...He discovered the identity of an Evanston girl who killed
herself before the newspapers regular reporter could..."
"...He is a former Mt. Vernon native..."
d. "...more attention should be paid to hazing by university offi
cials..."
e. "...bar ministers who have committed sex offenses from the
pulpit for a year..."
f. "...He plans to teach a course this fall... on the mysterious
civilization at Indian Community College..."
INTRODUCTION 7
And the very same columnist is positively permissive about the infamous
split infinitive:10
(3) ''...The proper formation, she insists, was "to go quickly"
or "quickly to go", but under no circumstances could one
write "to quickly go". This is pure baloney, of course, but
it is baloney with a remarkable shelf life..."
The sense of 'grammar' used in this book is unabashedly that of
descriptive grammar. The grammar of current American English is
described just like the grammar of any other language. Like all languages,
however — especially those that serve large, complex societies — 'Ameri
can English' is in a way a convenient fiction. Rather than consisting of a
single speech community with a single grammar, American English is a
complex multi-layered speech community with an immense array of gram
mars. These grammars indeed partially overlap and are historically inter
related. But their diversity is manifest to anybody with a discerning ear. It
is then left to the descriptive grammarian to make choices within this diver
sity, and then defend them, and hopefully convince the reader that they are
well motivated.
The dimensions along which grammars most commonly vary are:
(a) History: Older/obsolete vs. newer/current usage
(b) Age: Older vs. younger speakers
(c) Medium: Written vs. spoken language
(d) Education: Educated vs. uneducated speakers
(e) Formality: Formal vs. informal style
(f) Social class: High-status vs. low-status speakers
(g) Ethnicity: Majority vs. minority sub-cultures
(h) Geography: Regional, urban vs. rural dialects
(i) Native skill: Native vs. non-native speakers
(j) Individual: This individual or family vs. that one
These dimensions are not totally independent of each other. Rather, they
show predictable tendencies to co-vary. Thus, for example, written lan
guage (c) tends to be associated more strongly with older usage (a), older
speakers (b), educated speakers (d), formal usage (e), higher social status
(f) and urban dialects (h). But these associations are not absolute. In the
following sections we will survey each dimension briefly.
8 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
better by presenting several co-existing variant uses, and then explain their
relatedness. Then the linguist may even venture a prediction about which
way the grammar might be drifting.
1.2.4. Spoken vs. written language
The grammar of a written language is profoundly different from that of
the spoken language. The differences are often sharp and absolute, given
the constant grammatical innovation that goes on in the spoken language.
But even when not absolute, the differences between oral and written
grammar can be striking in terms of frequency distribution. Complex,
hierarchic syntactic constructions are systematically shunned in relaxed,
informal, colloquial face-to-face communication. Short, conjoined, 'flat'
structures are preferred. And the availability of the interlocutor, with eye-
contact, instant feedback, corrections, assents and mutually-negotiated
coherence, has a profound effect on the grammatical structure of the spo
ken language.21
The two main registers controlled by educated speakers — the infor
mal-colloquial and the formal-written — are equally useful and equally
valid. The tradition of denigrating the child's native oral register as 'bad
language', 'ungrammatical', 'uncouth' or 'careless' is indeed a destructive,
misguided tradition. However, the two registers fit appropriately in mutu
ally exclusive contexts:
(a) Oral language is the instrument of face-to-face communication,
among familiars, in the relaxed, unhurried setting of home, fam
ily, loved ones. It is appropriate for communicating within the
society of intimates.
(b) Written language is for more formal, impersonal, abstract com
munication elsewhere, in the more pressured setting of education
and literacy-demanding jobs — within the society of strangers.
The profound bilingualism that this dichotomy entails, for the literate
speaker, is as pervasive as it is necessary. Each register, oral and written,
serves a unique function that cannot be performed by the other.
As an example of typical spoken English, consider the following trans
cript of a recorded personal narrative: 22
14 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
of their first second language — the written register. This is often done
rather abruptly and under the less-than-intimate conditions of public educa
tion.
Since the grammar of the written language is more extensive as well as
more complex, and since to some extent the grammar of the oral register is
a sub-set of written grammar, it is not an accident that descriptive gramma
rians wind up describing primarily the grammar of the written register. But
this understandable preference again must be tempered with recognizing
the dynamic relationship between the two registers. The primacy, creative
vigor and central role of the spoken language must be acknowledged. What
also must be acknowledged is the fact that the more conservative grammar
of the written register is constantly being replenished by innovations that
arise mostly in the spoken register.
1.2.5. Educated vs. uneducated grammar
In the main, the division between educated and uneducated grammar
closely parallels the division of written vs. spoken language, respectively.
Educated speakers, however, tend to control a wider range of spoken
genres, some of which approximate — in their formality and complexity —
the grammar of the written register. While the descriptive grammarian is
often bound to describe the grammar of educated speakers as, at some
level, 'the norm', what was noted above about the primacy of the spoken
language remains applicable here.
It is not uncommon for educated speakers or writers to abuse their
'upper' register. In their zeal for complexity and the right scholarly turn of
phrase, such users often miss the point; namely that language, however
complex or lofty its subject matter, is still an instrument of communication.
As an illustration of extreme abuse of the scholarly jargon, consider:24
(18) "If the Roman government at the height of its power, and
at the time when means of communication had been
greatly improved, showed anxiety for the food supply of
that Italy which was dominant in the Mediterranean
world, it may be imagined that in the period preceding the
great economic organization introduced by the Roman
Principate the peoples of the Mediterranean region,
peoples no one of which at the height of its power had
controlled the visible food supply of the world so widely or
so absolutely, had far graver cause for anxiety on the same
16 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
Words in our lexicon code our concepts of entities; words thus have
meaning. The entities coded by words may 'exist' in several distinct senses.
First, they may be part of our experience of the so-called external ('real')
world, accessible in principle to all members of the human species. Second,
they may be part of each person's internal mental world, accessible to that
person only. Third, they may be part of our socially-negotiated cultural uni
verse, within which we construe both external and internal entities as well
as customs, institutions, interpretations, behavior patterns and so on. This
universe is taken to be accessible to all members of the same culture. In
most speech communities, the cultural universe is the most inclusive uni
verse, subsuming the external universe. It also subsumes at least some por
tions of the internal universe, presumably those that — via communication
and repeated comparison — have come to be regarded as socially-shared.30
Clauses, also called sentences, code propositions. A proposition com
bines concepts — i.e. words — into information. Information is about rela
tions, qualities, states or events in which entities partake. And those rela
tions, qualities, states or events may again reflect in some fashion our exter
nal world, internal world, culturally-negotiated world, or various combina
tions thereof.
In discourse, lastly, individual propositions are combined together into
coherent communication or coherent text. Discourse is thus predominantly
multi-propositional, and its coherence is a property that transcends the
bounds of isolated propositions.
To illustrate the combinatorial relation of word-meaning, propositional
information and discourse coherence, consider the utterances:
(23) Words:
a. drive
b. insane
constant
d. abuse
e. maid
f. kill
g. butler
h. knife
i. hide
j . fridge
INTRODUCTION 23
(24) Propositions:
a. The maid was driven insane.
b. The butler constantly abused the maid.
The maid killed the butler with a knife.
d. The maid hid the knife in the fridge last night.
(25) Multi-propositional discourse:
Having been driven insane
by constant abuse,
the maid killed the butler with the knife
that she had hidden in the fridge the night before.
Taken by themselves, outside any propositional context, the words in
(23a-j) can only have meaning, each one coding some concept. That is, you
may only ask about them questions such as:
(26) What d o e s - m e a n ?
Uttered as part of propositions, as in (24a-d), the very same words now
partake in the coding of propositional information. In addition to questions
of meaning as in (26), the individual propositions in (24) may now give rise
to many questions of information, such as:
(27) a. Was the maid driven insane?
b. Who abused the maid?
Who killed the butler?
d. Who did the maid kill?
e. What did the maid kill the butler with?
f. Did the maid kill the butler?
g. Where did the maid hide the knife?
h. When did the maid hide the knife in the fridge?
Finally, the multi-propositional text in (25), in which the isolated prop
ositions of (24) are linked, has discourse coherence. In addition to ques
tions of meaning as in (26), and of information as in (27), one may also ask
questions that pertain to that coherence; such as:
(28) a. Why did she kill him?
b. How come she had a knife?
Why had the maid hidden the knife in the fridge?
d. Could she perhaps have talked to him first before taking such
a drastic step?
e. Was her action reasonable? Was it defensible in a court of
law?
24 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
The questions in (28) may appear deceptively like those in (27). How
ever, each question in (27) could be answered on the basis of knowing only
one proposition in (24). In contrast, none of the questions in (28) could be
answered on the basis of such atomic propositional knowledge. Rather, the
knowledge of several propositions in the coherent discourse (25), or even of
the entire coherent text, is required in order to answer the questions in
(28).
One may argue that on some occasions single words are used to carry
information rather than merely convey conceptual meaning. As an illustra
tion of such a case, consider the following exchange:
(29) a. SPEAKER A: -Who killed the butler?
b. SPEAKER : -The maid.
Disregarding for the moment the definite article 'the', speaker B's response
in (29b) includes only a single lexical word, 'maid'. 31 However, such a
single-word response is in fact a truncated clause, standing in for the whole
proposition:
(30) The maid killed the butler.
Only in the proper discourse context of (29a) could (29b) be a coherent
communication, standing for the propositional information (30).
Similarly, in other rigidly prescribed communicative contexts, single-
word communications may stand for more expanded propositional informa
tion. Some typical examples are:
(31) a. Scalpel! (= 'Give me a scalpel!')
( > when uttered by a surgeon in the operating room)
b. Water! (= 'Give me water!')
( > when uttered by a person crawling out of the desert)
Mommy! (= 'Mother, I need you!')
(> when uttered by a child)
d. Gravy? (= 'Would you like some gravy?')
(> when uttered at the dinner table)
e. Scram! (= 'Get out of here!')
(>when uttered by a frustrated interlocutor)
The considerable independence of conceptual meaning from proposi
tional information is easy to demonstrate by constructing grammatically
well-formed sentences that make no sense; that is, sentences whose words
are perfectly meaningful each taken by itself, but still do not combine into
a cogent proposition, as in:32
INTRODUCTION 25
(43)
The deep structure descriptions (47) and (48) reveal that the adjective
'easy' in the surface structure (44a)/(45) is derived from the adverb 'easily'
in the deep-structure (47). One sees now that in (44a) 'Sally' is the object of
the verb 'please'. In contrast, the adjective 'eager' in the surface structure
(44b)/(45) remains an adjective in the deep-structure (48). One also sees
now that 'Sally' in (44b), in addition to being the subject of 'eager', is also
the subject of the verb 'please'.
A similar case of syntactic-semantic ambiguity involves the complex
clause:
(49) I am looking for someone to teach.
Its ambiguity may be pointed out by the expansions:
(50) a. I am looking for someone to teach French.
(> ...someone so that they teach (someone) French.)
b. I am looking for someone to teach French to.
(> ...someone so that I teach them French.)
The deep-structure description of the two potential senses of (49) —
(50a,b) — must reveal the crucial difference concerning whether the subject
of 'look-for' is either the subject or the object of 'teach'. The more
expanded (50a,b), while still considerably mutilated as compared to their
full-fledged deep structure, are already revealing enough to differentiate
between the two interpretations of (49).
36 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
NOTES
1) Proponents of the arbitrariness of grammar are fond of asserting that if not 100% of the
rules of grammar are functionally transparent, or if a single rule is not 100% transparent, a
functionalist approach is untenable. This all-or-nothing approach is again consonant with the
logic-machine view of grammar, rather than with a more realistic biologically-based approach.
2) In the structural design of biological organisms, one also finds many instances of excess
structure (Gould, 1980), whereby neither the current nor any older function seems to be per
formed. Most often, this turns out to reflect higher and more abstract levels of biological design.
Within those levels, structures do not correspond in a simple one-to-one fashion to more obvi
ous, concrete, lower-level functions. Rather, they tend to reflect higher-level meta-functional
requirements, ones that arise from combining multi-level structures — and their corresponding
functions — into a single complex design. At that level of complexity, the whole is not always
the mere sum of its parts.
3) See Berko (1961). Children acquiring English as their first language are prone to rebel
against such counter-communicative rules, and often insist on regularizing them, commonly
pluralizing 'foot' as 'foots' and 'fish' as 'fishes', or deriving the past tense of 'see' first as 'seed'
and later as 'sawed'.
4) See Mayr (1974).
5) For the distinction between automated and attended-analytic processing, see Posner and
Snyder (1974) or Schneider and Shiffrin (1977). For grammar as an automated processing
device, see Givón (1989, ch. 7).
6) Cited from Jespersen (1921/1964, p. 65).
7) James Kilpatrick, in the Eugene, OR, Register-Guard, 11-11-90.
8) Brown (1986, pp. 191-202) tracks this usage back at least 200 years.
9) James Kilpatrick, in the Eugene, OR, Register-Guard, sometime in 1989.
10) Ibid., approx. one year later.
11) Courtesy of Robert Stockwell (in personal communication).
12) McNeil (1970).
13) This is widespread among American children into their teens. Dwight Bolinger (in per
sonal communication) notes that in his own speech the frozen form 'gimme it' is acceptable,
while 'He gave her it', 'they gave us it', 'she gave him them' etc. are not.
14) Hamburger and Crain (1982).
15) Gruber (1967a).
16) Gruber (1967a).
17) Bowerman (1983).
18) Quoted from Jespersen (1921/1964, p. 320).
19) Ibid., p. 322.
20) "At whom the dog barks" by Lore Segal; The New Yorker, Dec. 3, 1990 (p. 45).
38 ENGLISH G R A M M A R
21) For a comparative view of spoken vs. written language, see Ochs (1979); Givón (1979a,
ch. 5). For an overview of the structure of conversation, see Goodwin (1981).
22) From the life-story of a retired New Mexico rancher in his early fifties, tape-recorded in
Bloomfield, NM in the winter of 1980. Oral conversation tends to differ even more from the
written register.
23) From a personal letter by a California woman in her mid thirties.
24) The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th Edition, in an article on ancient Greece; as cited in
an issue of The New Yorker ca. 1988.
25) A letter from Alumni Chapter President, Joe Quarterman, in Maryland Architecture,
newsletter of the University of Maryland Architecture Alumni Chapter; as cited in an issue of
The New Yorker, sometime in 1990.
26) From Elmore Leonard, Unknown Man # 89 (NY: Avon Books, 1977). This particular
trait of spoken American English is discussed in chapter 9.
27) From a New York Times article, reprinted in the San Francisco Chronicle, date unre
corded.
28) Posted at the Grand Hotel, Ciberon, Indonesia; quoted from The New Yorker from
sometime in 1987.
29) The theoretical and methodological problems that leaps to mind here are not easy to solve.
Does one continue to 'say the same thing' when one has found another way of saying it? The gist
of the problem is, of course, how to define it independently of 'the way of saying if.
30) The philosophical mine-field which we will deliberately sidestep here has been a matter of
stormy debate over 2500-odd years of Western civilization. The debate concerns what both mind
and language 'represent'. Implicitly, I pursue here a middle-ground Pragmatist approach, close
in spirit to Kant, Peirce and Wittgenstein. Within this pragmatic framework, language stands for
mental entities, be those concepts, mental propositions or mental text. Those mental entities in
turn may stand for a rather heterogenous universe, part of which may reflect 'The External
World', other parts a purely 'Internal Universe', other parts yet the culturally-shared universe.
The reader interested in pursuing these issues further may wish to consult my Mind, Code and
Context (1989).
31) We will ignore for the moment the fact that it also includes the grammatical operator
'the'. This operator, the English definite article, is used here to code the discourse coherence of
'maid' across the two clauses — A's question and B's response.
32) This celebrated example is due to N. Chomsky.
33) The notion 'same concept' is of course a relative matter. No concept in one language is
exactly the same as its equivalent — even close equivalent — in another. For an extensive discus
sion of this, see again my Mind, Code and Context (1989, ch. 9).
34) Harris (1956); Chomsky (1957, 1965).
35) This sense of underlie used here is more akin to Harris' (1956) than to Chomsky's (1965)
revised framework. In the latter, one derives complex clauses from their underlying simple
clauses through transformations. The motivation for Chomsky's approach was, as far as one can
judge, purely formal, having to do with considerations of descriptive simplicity and economy.
From the perspective adopted here, the usefulness of viewing the relationship between a simple
and a complex clause as a transformational derivation is an issue for cognitive or neurological,
and certainly empirical, investigation.
INTRODUCTION 39
36) Due to Chomsky's (1965) revision of his and Harris' earlier transformational framework.
37) Some formal syntacticians insist on differences here too, but for our purpose such differ
ences may be safely ignored.
38) After Chomsky (1957).
39) Again due to Chomsky (1957).
2 I VOCABULARY: WORDS A N D MORPHEMES
2.1. PRELIMINARIES
fields and the sound system. Only an expert — an etymologist — could tell
the foreign origin of such early-borrowed words. The same is not true of
either the Norman-French or later learned Latin borrowings. These are dis
tinguishable to this day from the Germanic vocabulary of English, by the
following cluster of criteria:
criterion Germanic Romance
% of members
in each segment
of the category
space
criteria. These criteria may be considered the top of the hierarchy of seman
tic features by which humans classify verbally-coded experience. They
are: 13
(a) temporal stability (rate of change over time)
(b) concreteness (physicality)
(c) compactness (degree of spatial scatter)
(d) complexity (number of defining features)
The way these criteria define the three lexical classes also serves to high
light the relevance of the notion prototype for our classification. We will
illustrate the application of these criteria by considering some simple propo
sitions that code states or events:
(10) a. The tree is green.
b. The woman was angry.
The situation was becoming chaotic.
d. The weather there is unpredictable.
e. The tall man then shot the deer.
f. The girl then listened to his story.
g. The value of her house was slowly depreciating.
(i) Nouns
The cluster of experiential features that are typically coded as nouns
tend to be relatively complex (multi-featured), concrete (physical), com
pact (packed together in space). Above all, they are time-stable (slow-
changing). That is, from one minute to the next one of their attributes may
change, but the majority of their more important attributes remain rela
tively the same. Thus, if a 'tree' in (10a) shed its green leaves in the fall, its
shape, structure, stationary orientation, bio-ecological position etc. would
remain stable enough to insure its still being a tree. Similarly, 'woman' in
(10b) may stop being angry, may be taller or shorter, darker or fairer, smar
ter or duller etc.; but her major attributes — human, female, adult, etc. —
remain intact. Other equally prototypical nouns in (10) are 'man', 'deer',
'girl' or 'house'.
On the other hand, 'situation' (10c), 'weather' (10d), 'story' (10f) or
'value' (10g) are non-prototypical, being either more abstract, diffuse, or
temporally unstable.
VOCABULARY: WORDS AND MORPHEMES 55
(ii) Adjectives
The experiential phenomena typically coded as adjectives tend to be
relatively simple (single-featured) attributes of prototypical nouns; that is,
inherent, concrete, time-stable qualities such as color, shape, size, consis
tency, texture, weight etc. Thus, 'green' in (10a) and 'tall' in (10e) are such
prototypical adjectives. On the other hand, 'angry1 (10b), 'chaotic' (10c)
and 'unpredictable' (lOd) all code states that are both more temporary and
more abstract.
(iii) Verbs
The experiential phenomena typically coded as verbs tend to be of
intermediate complexity, involving concrete (perceptually accessible)
events, either of physical motion or physical action, and above all fast
changing events. Thus 'shoot' (10e) is a fairly prototypical verb, being con
crete, an action and a fast change. 'Listen1 ( 1 Of), on the other hand, is less
prototypical. It is an invisible event, mental rather than physical, involving
no discernible action. It may also be temporally drawn-out rather than com
pact. And 'depreciate 1 (10g) is even less prototypical, involving a relatively
slow change of highly abstract properties.
2.4.4. Nouns
2.4.4.1. Semantic characteristics
The old school-grammar definition "a noun is a name of a person, a
place or a thing11, while suggestive, refers primarily to prototypical nouns.
The semantic classification of nouns is vast, and the subject of lifetime work
for semanticists and lexicographers. The classification discussed below
touches only on the most general features of nouns, the ones that tend to:
(a) yield large classes;
(b) be attested in many languages; and
(c) be relevant to grammatical behavior.
a. Concreteness
Concrete nouns code entities that exist in both space and time. Tem
poral nouns code entities that exist only in time. Abstract nouns code
entities whose existence cannot be defined in terms of either time or space.
Typical nouns in these classes are:
56 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
(11) a. Concrete:
rock, tree, horse, woman, house, knife, chair, hill, sun
b. Temporal:
Sunday, year, morning, minute, July, event, anniversary
Abstract:
freedom, love, independence, size, policy, refusal
b. Animacy
Concrete nouns may be further divided into either animate or inani
mate. Animate nouns code the fauna — living, sentient beings. Inanimate
nouns code either the flora or inorganic entities. Typical nouns in these
classes are:
(12) a. Animate:
horse, woman, boy, fly, pigeon, snake
b. Inanimate:
grass, tree, house, knife, hill, river, meat, star, rock
c. Artifactness
Inanimate nouns can be further divided into either natural nouns or
artifacts. Thus, in (12b) above, 'grass, 'tree', 'hill', 'river', 'star', 'rock' and
'meat' 14 are natural entities. On the other hand, 'house' and 'knife' are
human-made artifacts.
d. Humanity
Animate nouns may be further divided into human and non-human
ones:
(13) a. Human:
woman, man, child, mother, teacher, speaker
b. Non-human:
horse, fly, pigeon, cow, bat, dinosaur, snake
e. Countability (individuation')
Both concrete and abstract nouns may be either count nouns — ones
that code individuated entities, or mass nouns — ones that code either
groups or unindividuated entities:
VOCABULARY: WORDS AND MORPHEMES 57
(14) a. Count:
Concrete: man, stone, horse, grain, drop, tree, house
Abstract: right, love, appearance, control
b. Mass:
Concrete: sand, water, blood, air
Abstract: right, love, appearance, control, empathy, freedom
As is apparent in (14), a number of nouns — particularly abstract ones —
may have either a count or a mass sense:15
(15) a. Count:
This is one right you cannot take away.
She was an old love of his.
He made an appearance.
We instituted a number of controls.
b. Mass:
He's here by right.
She's full of love.
For the sake of appearance
We lost control over the situation.
The typical grammatical roles that nouns play in the clause are subject,
direct object, indirect object, or predicate. Some examples of these roles—
which also entail placing the noun in typical syntactic positions — are:
(17) a. Subject, direct object:
The woman broke the knife
b. Subject, indirect object:
The ball rolled into the river
Predicate (non-referring):
This is a desk
d. Predicate (referring):
This is my desk
In addition, a noun typically occupies, within the noun phrase, the
position of head of the noun phrase, as in:17
( 18) Head of Noun Phrase :
a. Modified by an adjective:
the big sleep
b. Modified by a REL-clause:
the man I met yesterday
Modified by a numeral:
three women
d. Modified by a possessor:
Joe's wife
Finally, a noun could also be the modifier within the noun phrase,
rather than the head, as in:
(19) Modifier noun:
a. the delivery truck
b. a dog-house
trout-fishing
(b) Prepositions
Prepositions, which in English mark the role of the indirect object in
the clause, are written as separate words, but may be considered prefixes to
the first element of the noun phrase. English prepositions mark a variety of
semantic roles of indirect objects. Some examples are: 18
(23) in the house (location)
to the store (location)
at school (location)
under one roof (location)
near the next corner (location)
for Mary (beneficiary)
for a while (duration)
on Tuesday (time)
during the night (time)
with a hammer (instrument)
60 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
(d) Articles
Articles, which in English are written as separate words, may be con
sidered prefixes to the noun or to the noun phrase. Like possessor pro
nouns, they are a sub-class of determiners. Typical examples are:
(25) the roof
a chair
this case
that woman
any good idea
no excuse
(27) Adjective-to-noun :
input output
kind kind-ness
wide wid-th
serene seren-ity
(28) Noun-to-noun:
input output
king king-dom
governor governor-ship
president presiden-cy
child child-hood
*foli20 foli-age
anarchy anarch-ist
62 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
2.4.5. Adjectives
2.4.5.1. Semantic characteristics
One may divide adjectives somewhat roughly according to those that
are more prototypical, and thus code inherent, concrete, relatively stable
qualities of entities; and those that are less prototypical, and thus code
more temporary, less concrete states.21
(b) Color
Color adjectives are either antonym pairs for brightness, or cover the
rainbow and beyond, as in:
(31) a. Brightness: dark/light, dark/bright, black/white
b. Color: violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, red,
brown, beige, etc.
(d) Shape
Shape adjectives describe the shape of an object in one-, two- or three-
dimensional space, as in:
(33) a. One-dimensional: straight, crooked, bent, curve
b. Two-dimensional: round, square, oval, triangular,
rectangular, trapezoid
c. Three-dimensional: spherical, cubic, conical,
cylindrical, pyramidal
(e) Taste
Taste adjectives code the various tastes, such as:
(34) sweet, sour, salty, acid, bitter
(f) Tactile
Tactile adjectives code various tactile dimensions, such as:
(35) a. Texture: rough/smooth
b. Resistance: hard/soft
c. Pointedness: sharp/dull
(a) Evaluative
Evaluative adjectives, often in antonymic pairs, signal the subjective
preference of the speaker toward an entity, as in:22
(36) good/bad, pretty/ugly, nice/lousy, desirable/undesirable
Thus consider:
(41) a. Predicate adjective:
Mary is tall
b. Modifying adjective:
The tall woman
In English, adjectives may also appear in some less characteristic positions
that involve complex sentence patterns, in particular in association with
verbal complements, as in:
(42) a. You were wrong to say that
b. It's so good of you to come
c. It was hard to forget her
d. It's incredible that she showed up
e. She was anxious to leave
f. He is easy to please but hard to forget
g. I am aware of your predicament
h. Don't be afraid to jump
Such syntactic positions are more characteristic of verbs.24
2.4.6. Verbs
2.4.6.1. Semantic characterization
The discussion of the semantics of verbs will be deferred until chapter
3. This is so because verbs constitute the core of the semantic frame of
propositions. Thus, when one classifies the propositional-semantics struc
ture of simple clauses, one also winds up classifying the main semantic types
of verbs.
(b) Negation
Negation markers in English have complex patterns, ones that are best
understood in terms of their history. Most commonly, the negative mor
pheme not (or its contracted form -n't) is suffixed to the first ('left-most')
auxiliary before the verb. But when no auxiliary is present, the auxiliary
verb 'do' carries the negative suffix. Thus consider:
(48) a. She is-n't there
b. You can-'t do that
We have-n't finished yet
d. I'm not running
e. He did-n't quit
f. I do-n't know
2.4.7. Adverbs
2.4.7.1. Preamble
Of the four major lexical word-classes, adverb is the least homogenous
class and the hardest to define. This heterogeneity of adverbs is evident
across the board — in their semantics, syntax and morphology. Further,
many semantic sub-classes of adverbs are coded by either one-word adverbs
or by more complex syntactic constructions. As a grammatical category,
adverbs thus span the range between the lexical and the syntactic. In a later
chapter, we will indeed deal with one large class of syntactic adverbial con
structions — subordinate adverbial clauses.28
The classification given below is primarily a semantic classification of
adverbs, i.e. in terms of meaning or function. Within each class, we will
illustrate the range of morpho-syntactic diversity that adverbs tolerate.
brave brave-ly
purposeful purposeful-ly
deliberate deliberate-ly
sudden sudden-ly
manual manual-ly
verbal verbal-ly
However, the class of -/y-marked adverbs is semantically heterogeneous, so
that their morphological unity is not matched by unified function or mean
ing.
VOCABULARY: WORDS AND MORPHEMES 73
2.5.2. Prepositions
English prepositions mark various types of indirect object roles39 but
sometime also adverbial constructions (see earlier above). Typical simple
prepositions are:
(78) to, from, for, on, off, at, in, out, with, by, before, behind,
after, under, above, upon, between
Some prepositions are complex, and are derived mostly from nouns via a
possessive construction, 40 as in:
(79) on top of, in front of, in the middle of, at the bottom of,
in the back of, at the center of, outside (of), inside (of)
Syntactically, English prepositions precede the noun phrase, and are
thus prefixed to the first word in the noun phrase, be it the head noun or a
preceding modifier. As illustrations, consider:
78 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
(80) a. at home
b. to the store
c. on top of the house
d. in her beautiful new downtown office
2.5.3.1. Conjunctions
Some English conjunctions are simple, i.e. single words, while others
are complex. Others yet are historically complex but have become con
tracted and are now written as single words. Some examples are:
(82) a. Simple conjunctions:
and, but, or, so, then
b. Complex conjunctions:
and so, so then, later on, and then, so later on
Historically complex conjunctions:
however, moreover, furthermore, nevertheless
2.5.3.2. Subordinators
Subordinators may also be either simple, complex or historically com
plex, as in:
(83) a. Simple subordinators:
when, if, though, till, after, while, since
b. Complex subordinators:
in spite of, beginning with, because of, in order to, instead of
Historically complex subordinators:
because, until, although, despite
VOCABULARY: WORDS AND MORPHEMES 79
2.5.4. Pronouns
One may classify English pronouns semantically according to person,
number, gender and grammatical role. The most common set, used primar
ily for definite reference, are: 43
1st SG I me my mine
2nd SG you you your yours
3rd SG Fem she her her hers
3rd SG Masc he him his his
3rd SG Neut it it its its
1st PL we us our ours
2nd PL you you your yours
3rd PL they them their theirs
80 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
grammatical role
2.5.5. Determiners
The syntactic class of determiners includes a number of sub-groups,
each one with its specific grammatical functions.47 English determiners pre
cede the noun within the noun phrase. 48 We will discuss each sub-class
briefly below.
2.5.5.1. Articles
English articles are either definite, indefinite or non-referring:
(89) Definite: the
Indefinite: a(n), 49 some
Non-referring: any, no
2.5.5.2. Demonstratives
English demonstratives are divided according to two features — dis
tance from the speaker, and number.
(90) Demonstratives:
distance singular plural
2.5.6. Quantifiers
Quantifiers are noun-modifiers that connote quantity or extent, such
as:
(91) some, all, many, few, much, little, only, even
2.5.7. Numerals
Numerals are a sub-class of more exact quantifiers. They are noun-
modifiers that connote number, as in:
(92) one, two, three,...ten,... one million,...
2.5.8. Ordinals
Ordinals are a special sub-class of adjectives that connote serial order;
that is, the position of an item in some linear ranking, as in:
(93) first, second, third,...tenth,... one millionth,...
Except for the first three which have special forms, ordinals are coined
from their corresponding numerals by adding the suffix -th.
2.5.9. Auxiliaries
Auxiliaries — or auxiliary verbs — are part of the grammar of tense-
aspect-modality in English. They will be discussed in great detail in the
appropriate chapter below.51 The most common auxiliaries in English are:
(94) be, have, do, will, would, can, could, may, might, shall,
should, must
2.5.10. Interjections
Interjections are a heterogeneous class with a broad range of functions,
most commonly involving expressive and social-interactive functions. The
function of some interjections is primarily epistemic, signalling either assent
or disagreement with the information or belief of the interlocutor. Others
are deontic, expressing assent to or dissent from the interlocutor's action.
82 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
NOTES
1) 'Sharing a common vocabulary' and 'membership in the same culture' are obviously a
matter of degree. Cultures, or speech communities, provide for an organized diversity, so that—
as in the case of biological populations — membership and uniformity are to some extent rela
tive and flexible. The term 'organized diversity' follows the anthropologist A.F.C. Wallace
(1961): "...Culture...is characterized internally not by uniformity, but by diversity of both indi
viduals and groups, many of whom are in continuous overt conflict in one sub-system and in
active cooperation in another..." (Culture and Personality, 1961, p. 28).
2) See my Mind, Code and Context (1989, Chapters 3, 9).
3) For details see Jespersen (1938).
4) Under this late infusion of learned Latin vocabulary one must also subsume the infusion
of Greek scientific vocabulary.
5) For a discussion of how the largely-segregated Germanic and Romance phonological pat
terns of present-day English define two main corpora of English vocabulary, see Chomsky and
Halle (1968).
6) These stress-placement tendencies are not absolute, and non-Germanic words vary in
their degree of 'nativization' into the Germanic stress-pattern of English. A socio-cultural
dimension is predictably involved here, as in the courtroom usage of deFENCE vs. the ball-field
use of DEfence.
7) For more discussion of the largely-segregated derivational patterns of present-day Eng
lish, see Marchand (1965).
8) We will again disregard here the philosophical issue of 'objective' vs. 'subjective' knowl
edge.
9) From L. McMurtry, Leaving Cheyenne (1962, p. 109).
10) It is well known that children acquire lexical vocabulary ('content words'), and communi
cate in some sort of pidgin, long before they acquire grammar and grammatical morphology (or
'function words').
11) Jespersen presages here both the semantic relativism of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosoph
ical Investigations (1953) and the later cognitive psychology work on natural classes and pro
totypes; see my Mind, Code and Context (1989, ch. 2).
12) One could take issue with Sapir's suggestion that a "perfectly grammatical" language
would be a "perfect engine of conceptual expression". There are grounds for believing that such
a language would in fact be unprocessable by the brain of a biological organism. This has to do
with the interaction between communication in real-time, on the one hand, and memory (stor
age or retrieval) and attention limitations. When taken together, these factors have yielded a
cognitive and communicative system that retains a certain measure of context sensitivity and flex
ibility, in both the definition of meanings and the application of rules of grammar.
13) For further discussion of the prototypes of lexical classes, see Hopper and Thompson
(1984).
14) The status of 'meat' is somewhat mixed. While being part of a natural entity (animals),
the word most commonly refers to meat that has been removed from its natural configuration by
human intervention.
VOCABULARY: WORDS AND MORPHEMES 85
15) We categorize here word senses, not of word forms. Most words involve several senses
coded the same form. Often, those senses are either closely related, or at the very least histori
cally related.
16) The distinction between 'sense' ('connotation') vs. 'reference' ('denotation') in modern
philosophy is commonly attributed to Frege (Philosophical Writings, 1952). But the distinction
goes all the way back to (at least) Aristotle's De Sophisticis Elenchis (see McKeon, ed., 1941),
where the referring sense of predicate nouns is called sensus divisus and their attributive sense
sensus compositus.
17) The structure of noun phrases is discussed in chapter 6.
18) A more extensive discussion of the various indirect-object roles can be found in chapter
3. Some linguists restrict the term 'indirect object' to only a narrow range of semantic roles, such
as 'dative-recipient' and 'locative'. For those people, our use of 'indirect object' here can be
translated to 'prepositional object', i.e. an object marked by a preposition.
19) For an extensive treatment of English derivational morphology, see Marchand (1965).
20) The noun foli-um, from Latin, is the original input for foli-age. Many other examples of
this type exist in English: The input word is not in the language, or not any more; but the
derived output remains. A later version of folium, folio, still exits in learned English. Its deriva
tive portfolio also exists.
21) For an extensive discussion of prototypical and less prototypical adjectives, see Dixon
(1982).
22) At least adjectives of the first pair, good/bad, are so prevalent as subjective reflections on
inherent, stable qualities of entities, that in some sense they can be considered part of the pro
totypical subgroup, in spite of the fact that they do not connote concrete features.
23) Here the reader is again referred to Marchand (1965) for a near-exhaustive discussion of
derivation patterns, their associate morphology, and their meaning correlates.
24) For verb complements, see chapter 7.
25) For comparative constructions, see chapter 13.
26) The suffix -ing also derives nouns from verbs (see chapters 6 and 13). It also functions as
a grammatical aspect-marking morpheme (see chapter 4).
27) Here again, the original underived Latin verb, related to the still-extant gusto, does not
exist in English.
28) See chapter 13.
29) Prepositional phrases involve a noun or noun phrase preceded by a preposition. At this
level of detail in our description, we do not distinguish between 'prepositional object' and 'indi
rect object'. For further detail see chapter 3.
30) See chapter 13.
31) In chapter 3, below, we treat instruments marked by the preposition 'with' as one of the
optional indirect-object roles in the clause.
86 ENGLISH G R A M M A R
32) For noun phrases and modifiers, see chapter 6. One may also argue that 'yesterday', 'to
morrow' and 'Wednesday' in (63) are noun phrases. They certainly can be made to look like
noun phrases, when used as either the subject or object of the clause, as in:
Yesterday was a bad day
Tomorrow will be better
I hate Wednesdays
However, in such examples they are not used as adverbs.
33) See chapter 3.
34) See chapter 13.
35) For epistemic modalities and the use of English modals, see chapter 4. Some related
material is also found in chapters 7 and 13.
36) For perception-cognition-utterance verbs and their connection with the grammar of epis
temic modalities, see chapters 3, 4 and 7.
37) For obligative modalities and the use of modals, see again chapters 3 and 4.
38) For evaluative preference modalities associated with this type of verbs, see again chap
ters 3, 4 and 7.
39) See chapter 3.
40) See chapter 6.
41) See chapter 13.
42) For nominalized clauses see chapter 6.
43) Some of the core referential functions of pronouns are discussed in chapter 5. Other func
tions of various pronouns, and their interaction with other grammatical sub-systems, are discus
sed at relevant points throughout.
44) The pronouns in this last column may be considered double pronouns, since (a) they mark
the possessor, but (b) they also stand for an absent head noun. This is evident when their use is
compared with that of modifier possessor pronouns:
My brother lives at home.
Mine lives at home.
The pronoun 'mine' could only be used in a context where 'brother' — the referent of the head
noun — is understood.
45) See chapters 5, 6.
46) See chapters 9, 12.
47) See chapters 5,6.
48) See chapter 6.
49) The indefinite article a(n) may be used as either referring or non-referring. See chapter 5.
50) See chapter 6.
51) See chapter 4.
52) From an evolutionary perspective, it is most likely that the interactive aspects of social
communication are probably much older than grammar-coded communication, and that their
signal system evolved long before the advent of grammar, or even of verbal communication. The
VOCABULARY: WORDS AND MORPHEMES 87
same is certainly true of the developmental course of language, when first acquired by children
(see survey in Givón, 1979a, ch. 5; see also Schnitzer, 1989). The grammatical code is thus a rela
tively late adaptation, both ontogenetically and phylogenetically. The harnessing of some por
tions of the grammatical code to perform expressive and social-interactional functions should be
rightly viewed as a secondary adaptation, of a resource that was developed initially for another
function (communication). Such secondary adaptations are common elsewhere in biological
evolution.
3 SIMPLE VERBAL CLAUSES
3.1. PRELIMINARIES
3.1.1. Scope
In this chapter we survey the structure of simple verbal clauses (or
'simple sentences'). As noted earlier, the simple clause serves as reference
point for the description of all other clause-types in grammar. It is the
theme that undergoes different kinds of variations to yield complex clauses.
Describing the various types of simple clauses is tantamount to describing
the verb types of the language. This is so because verbs make up the seman
tic core of clauses, their proposìtional frame. Therefore, the type of verb
that occupies the semantic core of the clause defines the clause type.
Because of the strong correlation between meaning and form, by describing
the semantic types of verbs, one winds up also describing the syntactic types
of simple clauses.
Every verb, in its capacity as the core of a clause, is defined semanti-
cally in terms of the semantic roles of the participants ('arguments') in the
state or event coded by the clause. Within the clause, these participants
occupy the grammatical roles of, most commonly, subject, direct object,
indirect object, adverb1 or predicate. These grammatical roles are marked
in English by a combination of morphology and word-order. But they also
have other, more subtle, grammatical-behavioral properties, such as vari
ous constraints on their distribution in grammatical environments. 2
In describing the types of simple clauses and their structure, we will
describe simultaneously:
90 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
entertain a few words of caution concerning the use and limits of definitions:3
(a) The definitions given below are of the major semantic
roles. But in principle, each type may have finer and finer
sub-types, ad infinitum.
(b) The distinction between a 'major' type and a 'minor' sub
type is not a principled one, but rather a matter of prag
matic judgement. Most commonly, a major semantic type
is one that has more extensive grammatical consequences.
(c) In defining each semantic role, we only define a pro
totype. The majority of the members of a natural class
tend to conform, more or less, to the class's prototype.
But every natural population also has less prototypical
members that fit the prototype definition less well. Fortu
nately, such less prototypical members are — by definition
— a minority.
In principle, if one probes deep enough, each verb defines its own unique
propositional frame, thus its own idiosyncratic array of semantic roles.
The major semantic roles in the clause are:
a. agent = 'the participant, typically human, who acts delib
erately to initiate the event' (AGT)
b. patient = 'the participant, typically either human or non-
human, that either is in a state, or registers a
change-of-state as a result of the event' (PAT)
c. dative = 'a conscious participant in the event, typically
human, but not the deliberate initiator' (DAT)
d. instrument = 'a participant, typically inanimate, used by the
agent to perform the action' (INST)
e. benefactive = 'the participant, typically human, for whose
benefit the action is performed' (BEN)
f. locative = 'the place, typically concrete and inanimate,
where the state is, where the event occurs, or
toward which or away from which some partici
pant is moving' (LOC)
g. associative = 'a participant that is an associate of the agent,
patient or dative of the event, whose role in the
event is similar, but who is not as central or
important' (ASSOC)
92 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
grammatical role. But by definition, passives are complex rather than sim
ple clauses. In the active-simple clause, as long as an agent is involved, it
has a preemptive claim to the subject grammatical role.
Similarly, consider:
(8) a. Active: Mary heard Joe's voice.
b. Passive: Joe's voice was heard by Mary.
'
Mary' in (8a,b) is a conscious dative participant, exerting neither intent nor
control nor action in the depicted event. No agent is involved in the event
in (8a,b) in addition to the dative participant, only a patient— 'Joe's voice'.
In the competition for subjecthood in the active — simple — clause (8a),
the dative wins over the patient. Only in the passive — complex — clause
(8b) can the patient displace the dative as subject.
Finally, consider:
(9) The bread was in the oven.
The state depicted in clause (9) has neither an agent nor a dative partici
pant, only a patient ('the bread') and a locative ('in the oven'). Under such
conditions, the patient preempts the subject position, competing success
fully with the locative.5
3.1.4.2. The grammatical subject
The grammatical subject in English simple clauses precedes the verb, 6
is morphologically unmarked (i.e. appears without a preposition), and
requires grammatical agreement with the verb, at least to the limited extent
that exists in English, as in:
(10) a. The woman is tall ('is' = 3rd pers sg of 'be')
b. They are tall ('are' = pl of 'be')
I am tall ('am' = 1st pers sg of 'be')
d. You are tall ('are' — 2nd pers sg of 'be')
e. That man sings well (s = 3rd pers sg verb agreement)
f. Some men sing well
From a discourse-pragmatic perspective, the subject is the primary topic of
the clause. It is the most important participant of the discourse at the point
when the clause is processed. This role of the subject can be demonstrated
independently of grammar, but also explains many of the grammatical
properties of subjects.
SIMPLE VERBAL CLAUSES 95
(15)
In example (14/15) both the subject and the verbal predicate are single
words. But both may also be larger phrases, each with its own optionally-
added sub-constituents, as in:
(16) The tall woman was sleeping peacefully
SUBJ NOUN-PHRASE VERB PHRASE
And in turn, clause (14) must be now rendered more precisely as:
98 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
(18)
Our parsing conventions define all noun modifiers as parts of the noun
phrase. Auxiliaries, manner adverbs, direct objects and indirect objects are
defined as parts of the verb phrase. The core of the noun phrase is its head
noun, which may stand alone without any modifiers. But the entire noun
phrase may also consist of either a name or a pronoun. The core of the verb
phrase is the verb. To illustrate the expansion of the verb phrase to include
direct and indirect objects, consider (19a,b,c) below:
(19) a. Mary read the book (OBJ)
b. Mary talked to John (IO)
c. Mary gave the book to John (OBJ, IO)
The tree diagrams corresponding to (19a,b,c) are given in (20), (21) and
(22) below; respectively:
(20)
SIMPLE VERBAL CLAUSES 99
(33)
subject of 'become' can not be an agent; the event coded by it can not be an
action; and the predicate that follows it can be either adjectival — inherent
or temporary, or nominal — referring or non-referring. As illustration con
sider:
(35) a. She became a teacher (nominal, non-referring)
b. He became our teacher (nominal, referring)
c. She became tall (adjectival, inherent quality)
d. He became angry (adjectival, temporary state)
used up. The direct object 'wall is now construed as more affected, thus
more patient-like.
Pragmatically, a participant coded as direct object slot is more topical
than one coded as indirect object. This may be illustrated by adding a pre
ceding context to examples (82a,b), topicalizing either 'paint' or 'wall':
(83) a. Context: What did you do with the paint?
(i) I sprayed it on the wall.
(ii) ?I sprayed the wall with it.
b. Context: What did you do to the wall?
(i) I sprayed it with paint.
(ii) ?I sprayed the paint on it.
Strictly speaking, there is nothing 'ungrammatical' about variants (ii) of
(83a,b). But variants (i) seem more natural, more coherent, more likely. In
other words, the object that is topicalized in the preceding context is
rendered more naturally as the direct object.
(91)
SIMPLE VERBAL CLAUSES 127
(94)
(95)
(98)
Typical examples of PCU verbs are 'see', 'know' and 'say', as in:
(118) a. She saw that he was leaving
b. He knew that Marge had left town
They say she's going to recover
The syntactic structure of PCU verbs is given in the tree diagram (119)
below, representing (118b):
(119)
(133) a. Performance:
She forgot to solve the problem
( > She could, but didn't)
b. Know-how:
She forgot how to solve the problem
( > She couldn't, and didn't)
(134) a. Performance:
She remembered to go home
(> She remembered and did)
b. Know-how:
She remembered how to go home
( > She remembered the way,
but may not have gone home)
Semantic and syntactic characterization is thus not assigned to the verb as a
sequence of sounds, but rather to each particular sense of the verb.
b. SUBJ =
c. VP =
g. C O M P = S
h. IO = PP
i. PP = Ρ NP
j. OBJ = NP
k. NP =
144 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
NOTES
1) We noted earlier that many adverbs are structurally prepositional phrases, thus to some
extent overlapping — at least structurally — with indirect objects. At the level of analysis we are
concerned with here, we will more or less ignore the grammatical tests that distinguish between
a prepositional phrase that is an 'indirect object' and one that is an 'adverb'.
2) The bulk of these grammatical constraints will be dealt with in later chapters, since they
tend to involve the behavior of complex clauses; that is, the behavior of clauses in more complex
contexts.
3) What is said here about the limits of strict definitions of semantic roles also applies to
grammatical roles, although to a lesser degree. Given the more abstract, structural nature of
grammatical case-roles, they tend to exhibit a higher level of categoriality (or 'grammaticaliza-
tion').
4) For the purpose of the discussion here, we will ignore the role of 'adverb'. Its status as a
purely grammatical role in English is somewhat hazy. As noted in chapter 2, the morphological
form and syntactic position of adverbs are both rather variable. More subtle grammatical tests
go a longer way toward differentiating adverbs from indirect objects. But at this point such tests
cannot be discussed.
5) 'Locative' here stands in for all others' in (6).
6) In several complex clause-types, such as questions (chapter 12) or contrastive topics
(chapters 10, 11), the subject may be switched to other positions in the clause.
7) Or at least less topical than the direct object.
8) It may be argued that by adding more optional constituents, one increases the complexity
of the clause.
9) Several other aspects of transitivity will be discussed in chapters 7 and 8. For an extensive
discussion of transitivity in language, see Hopper and Thompson (1980); Givón (1984a, chapters
4,5.8); Givón (1990, chapters 13, 14).
10) It is also likely that the probability of the overlap between semantic and syntactic tran
sitivity in English is not the same in both directions. Thus, while a large majority of semantically-
transitive clauses are also syntactically transitive, probably a smaller majority of syntactically-
transitive clauses are also semantically transitive.
11) While 'it' does not exactly 'refer' to anything in such clauses, it does have some semantic
consequences. For example, it clearly stands for neither a male nor a female entity, but rather
an inanimate or non-human one. And it certainly is more of a 'singular' than a 'plural'.
12) The reference properties of noun phrases are discussed in considerable detail in chapter
5.
13) For a detailed discussion of verbal complements, see chapter 7.
14) English is not necessarily a typical language in this respect. In most languages transitivity
is more constrained semantically, though to varying degrees.
15) The term 'cognate' alludes to the fact that many such objects are in fact nominalized
forms of the activity-verb involved ('sing'/'song', 'dance'/'dance', 'talk'/'talk', 'lecture'/'lecture',
'promise'/'promise', etc.). Most of the others are also nominalized verbs, but they follow an unre
lated transitive verb (see (63) below).
SIMPLE V E R B A L CLAUSES 145
16) While semantically this may be viewed as 'downgrading', pragmatically the direct object
position codes more topical, important participants than the indirect object.
17) One may as well note that as a historical semantic extension of the transitive prototype,
an earlier sense of 'have' was the more concrete meaning of 'hold', 'seize', 'grab'. The semantic
extension involved the 'bleaching out' of the sense of concrete action, to leave only the sense of
resulting possession, eventually not even physical possession. The same process is currently
going on with 'get', which also retains its earlier sense of 'obtain'.
18) For discussion of the antipassive voice, see chapter 8.
19) While 'be angry at', 'be mad at', 'be disappointed at' etc. fit semantically in this group,
they are syntactically adjectival predicate constructions, and as such involve the copular verb
'be'.
20) The discourse-pragmatic function of this variant pattern, also called dative shifting, will be
discussed in chapter 11.
21) The arguments hinge on various grammatical-behavior criteria by which it is possible to
classify these optional prepositional phrases as adverbs, ones that are direct constituents of the
clause (S) rather than of the verb phrase (VP).
22) See section 3.3.8. directly below.
23) Or 'is deleted under identity'. In a transformational format of syntactic description, where
the surface structure of a complex clause is 'derived' from the deep syntactic structure of its com
ponent simple clauses, the zero expression of a co-referent NP is interpreted as 'deletion' of that
NP.
24) Both 'reluctant' and 'unable' are adjectives. In terms of their semantic and syntactic
relation to the complement clause, however, they follow the general pattern of modality verbs.
25) Or 'deleted under identity'; see footnote 23.
26) A number of complement-taking adjectives fall into the general syntactic pattern of PCU
verbs as described here. Such adjectives are 'be afraid', 'be aware', 'be sure', 'be certain', 'be
hopeful' and others.
27) Several factive predicates are adjectives in English, such as 'be sad', 'be happy', 'be dis
gusted', 'be encouraged', 'be disappointed' and others. For an extensive discussion of the
semantics of factive predicates, see Kiparsky and Kiparsky (1968).
28) Incorporated prepositions in Latin-derived Romance verbs are pre-verbal, as in 'im-bibe',
'ex-pell', 'sub-ject', 'sur-prise', 'per-form', 'pre-tend', 'ab-sorp', ac-cept', 're-ceive', 'de-ceive',
'ob-tain', etc. The same pre-verbal pattern of incorporating prepositions is found in German.
29) An extensive discussion of these regularities can be found in Lindner (1982). A discussion
of this lexical extension pattern as metaphoric extension of the meaning of locative prepositions
can be found in Lakoff and Johnson (1980).
30) An account of the pragmatics factors controlling this variation may be found in Chen
(1986).
31) In standard transformational formats, this summary — called Phrase-Structure Rules — is
considered a description of the 'competence' of the grammar user, and is thus given a much
more prominent theoretical status. See Chomsky (1965).
4 VERBAL INFLECTIONS: TENSE, ASPECT,
MODALITY AND NEGATION
4.1. INTRODUCTION
The grammar of verbal inflections is often the most complex part of the
grammar in any language. In terms of function, it spans over all three well-
coded functional realms of language: Lexical meaning, propositional informa
tion, and discourse coherence. In terms of morpho-syntactic structure, it
often involves a mix of diachronically older bound morphemes and dia-
chronically younger verb-like auxiliaries, with the latter having not only
morphological but also syntactic status.
The verbal inflections of English represent successive generations of
historical development, and often bear the footprints of their protracted
history. This is true in terms of the position of verbal inflections — both
auxiliaries and bound affixes — relative to the verb, as well as in terms
of the rules that govern their grammatical behavior. What is more, the his
tory of the tense-aspect-modal system of English is far from over. New
operators are still being introduced into the system; and both those and the
system as a whole are in the process of being re-shaped.
We will begin our survey by considering the three main functional
domains that underlie the system:
(a) Tense
(b) Aspect
(c) Modality
After surveying the syntactic behavior of these three, we will discuss the
fourth category
(d) Negation
148 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
4.2. TENSE
4.2.1. Preliminaries
The category tense codes the relation between two points along the
ordered linear dimension of time — the time of speech and event time. The
time of speech serves as the universal reference-point for event time. The
relation between the two may be represented diagrammatically as follows:
(1) Tense and time
4.2.2. Past
The past tense in English is marked most commonly by the suffix -ed.
For a group of irregular verbs, the form is unpredictable, and involves
internal changes in the form of the verb-stem itself. Some of these verbs
are:
VERBAL INFLECTIONS 149
sing sang
see saw
bring brought
know knew
be was/were
come came
go went
stand stood
sit sat
leave left
have had
run ran
begin began
find found
teach taught
hang hung
put put
cast cast
etc.
4.2.3. Future
The future tense in English is marked by three alternative forms:
(a) the modal auxiliary 'will'
(b) the complex auxiliary 'be going to'
(or the contracted 'be gonna')
(c) the progressive auxiliary 'be...-ing'
Examples of the three are, respectively:
150 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
4.2.4. Present
The present tense is not specifically marked in English. Rather, in the
absence of explicit marking of any other tense, the progressive aspect,
marked by the suffix -ing, is interpreted as a present progressive, as in:
(4) He is chopping wood
Stative verbs, ones that code a state rather than an event, typically
don't take the progressive aspect. The 'present' meaning of such verbs is
signalled by the habitual form, which is then ambiguous; it signals either the
habitual or the present tense. As illustration of this, compare (5) and (6)
below:
(5) Active (event) verb:
a. Past: He chopp-ed wood
b. Present-progressive: He is chopping wood
Habitual: He (always) chops wood
VERBAL INFLECTIONS 151
4.2.5. Habitual
The simple — unmarked — form of the English verb is often labeled,
mistakenly, the 'present'. This is the verb-form that requires third-person-
singular subject agreement, coded by the suffix -s. Thus compare:
(10) number
4.3. ASPECT
4.3.1. Preliminaries
Aspect in English, as elsewhere, encompasses a group of heterogenous
semantic and pragmatic categories. 2 Some involve temporal properties of
the event, such as boundedness, sequentiality or temporal gapping. Others
involve purely pragmatic notions such as relevance. Others yet involve
more subtle facets of the perspective taken by the speaker. While aspects
are distinguished from tenses, they often combine with various tenses.
What is more, in such combinations aspects often display distinct patterns
VERBAL INFLECTIONS 153
of association with particular tenses. But even granting that the separation
between 'tense' and 'aspect' is not absolute, it is still useful to treat the two
notions separately.
from close proximity, with all details visible. It is as if the observer is placed
right at the scene. In contrast, from a bounded, narrow-angle perspective
the event is viewed from a remote vantage point. The observer is removed
from the scene and its minute details.
The strong, near automatic association of the progressive with the pre
sent — absent explicitly marked tense — is indeed a cognitive reflection of
the metaphoric extension from spatial to temporal proximity. Proximity —
whether spatial or temporal — has similar cognitive consequences. 4
4.3.5.2. Anteriority
The perfect bears a strong but not binding association with 'past'. The
fact that the association is not absolute can be seen from the fact that the
perfect can be used with three distinct temporal reference points: (a) Time
of speech, (b) Past, and (c) Future. With respect to each one, the perfect
codes an event that either occurred or was initiated prior to the temporal
reference point. This may be illustrated in:
(36) a. Present perfect:
(Speaking now,) She has (already) finished
b. Past perfect:
(When he arrived,) She had (already) finished
Future perfect:
(When he arrives,) She will have (already) finished
4.3.5.3. Perfectivity
The perfect may be used to signal an event that has been terminated or
accomplished before the reference time. As an example consider the
exchange:
(40) A: -Why don't you go and wash your hands?
B: -I've already washed them.
4.3.5.4. Counter-sequentiality
One of the more pragmatic features of the perfect involves its use in
signaling that the event stands out of temporal sequence in the narrative.
Here the perfect again contrasts with the simple — sequential — past,
which codes events that are recounted in proper temporal sequence. As
illustration, compare (41) and (42) below:
(41) Simple past:
a. She came back into the room,
b. looked around,
spotted the buffet
d. and went to get a sandwich....
(42) Perfect past:
a. She came back into the room
b. and looked around.
She had spotted the buffet earlier,
d. So she went to get a sandwich...
In narrative (41), the events are all recounted in the same order in which
they occurred, with all verbal clauses marked with the simple-sequential
past. In narrative (42) of the very same chain of events, event (42c) is
recounted after (42b), though in fact it occurred before (42b). The verb in
(42c) — the off-sequence link in the chain — is therefore marked
with the perfect aspect. Further, the counter-sequential placement of (42c)
precipitates a thematic break in the discourse, signalled by a period punctu
ation in (42b).
The difference between the sequential ('perfective') aspect and the
perfect may be illustrated diagrammatically as follows:
164 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
4.3.5.5. Relevance
A major pragmatic feature associated with the perfect involves the
judgement of relevance of the information in the perfect-marked clause.
Here again it is most instructive to contrast first the perfect-past with the
simple sequential past, as in:
VERBAL INFLECTIONS 165
The immediate aspect contrasts with the simple past, which codes a
more remote perspective on the event. As an illustration of this contrast,
compare the same 'objective' series of events, rendered below in both
aspects:
(53) a. Remote:
...So I gave him his instructions, and I told him to go
ahead and do it. And he said he would. Y'know, I really
trusted the guy, I had known him for a long time.
Plus, he was taking notes all along. So I figured...
Well, what the heck, it all happened such a long time
ago...
b. Immediate:
...So I give him his instructions, and I tell him I say
go ahead and do it. And he says he will. Hey, I really
trust the guy, I've known him for such a long time.
Plus he's taking notes and all. So I figure...
I tell you, I'm still so pissed I could...
There is obviously a certain correlation between the aspectual contrast
immediate vs. remote and the genre contrast oral vs. written discourse. The
immediate aspect is probably used much more frequently in oral narrative.
But literary usage has borrowed the contrast, to the point where whole
stories, essays or novels may be written in the immediate aspect. As an
example of a highly literary usage, consider the following passage from
Donald Barthelme's short story ' T h e Emperor": 11
(54) "...His gifts this morning include two white jade tigers, at
full scale, carved by the artist Lieh Yi, and the Emperor
himself takes brush in hand to paint their eyes with dark
lacquer; responsible officials have suggested that six
thousand terra-cotta soldiers and two thousand terra-cotta
horses, all full scale, be buried, for the defense of his
tomb; the Emperor in his rage orders that three thousand
convicts cut down all the trees on Mt. Hsiang, leaving it
bare, bald, so that responsible officials may understand
what is possible; the Emperor commands the court poets
to write poems about immortals, pure beings, and noble
spirits who by their own labor change night to day, and
168 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
4.4. MODALITY
4.4.1. Propositional modalities
The propositional modality associated with a clause may be likened to
a shell that encases it but does not tamper with the kernel inside. The prop
ositional frame of clauses — participant roles, verb-type, transitivity — as
well as the actual lexical items that fill the various slots in the frame, remain
largely unaffected by the modality wrapped around it. Rather, the modality
codes the speaker's attitude toward the proposition. By 'attitude' we mean
here primarily two types of judgement made by the speaker concerning the
propositional information carried in the clause:
(a) Epistemic judgements of truth, probability, certainty, belief or
evidence.
(b) Evaluative judgements of desirability, preference, intent, ability,
obligation or manipulation.
In principle, both the epistemic and evaluative mega-modalities display
shading and gradation, within as well as across categories. 14 But the range
of well-coded modalities in any specific language is more limited. So that in
our discussion of modality in English, we will be guided by the search for
grammatically well-coded modal categories. Although in at least one major
area, that of the irrealis modality, the epistemic and evaluative modes over
lap to quite a degree, and often share their grammatical coding.
(a) Presupposition:
The proposition is assumed to be true, either by definition, by prior
agreement, by general culturally-shared conventions, by being obvious
to all present at the speech situation, or by having been uttered by the
speaker and left unchallenged by the hearer. 15
(b) Realis assertion:
The proposition is strongly asserted as true; but challenge from the
hearer is deemed appropriate, although the speaker has evidence or
other grounds to defend his/her strong belief.
(c) Irrealis assertion:
The proposition is weakly asserted as either possible or likely (or neces
sary or desired, in the converging evaluative case); but the speaker is not
ready to back it up with evidence or other strong grounds; and chal
lenge from the hearer is readily entertained or even explicitly solicited.
(d) Negative assertion:
The proposition is strongly asserted as false, most commonly in con
tradiction to the hearer's explicit or assumed beliefs; challenge from the
hearer is anticipated, and the speaker has evidence or other grounds to
back up his/her strong belief.
In the following sections we will deal primarily with the contrast
between the realis (b) and Irrealis () modalities, beginning with a survey of
the distribution of modality in the various categories of grammar. The
evaluative aspects of irrealis will be covered within the discussion of modal
auxiliaries and irrealis-marked adverbs. Negation will be discussed in a sep
arate section further below. Presupposition is the modality with the least
grammatical marking (although many other grammatical consequences) in
English, and will receive only limited discussion in this chapter.
4.4.3.1. Tense-aspect
The following correlations between tense-aspect and epistemic modal
ity are highly predictable:
(a) Past === > R-assertion (or presupposition)
(b) Perfect === > R-assertion (or presupposition)
(c) Present === > R-assertion
(d) Future === > IRR-assertion
(e) Habitual === > IRR-assertion
The realis effect of 'past', 'perfect' and 'present' holds only if no other
irrealis-inducing operator intervenes. In formal terms, one may consider
realis as the 'unmarked' category, automatically prevailing unless some
other modality intervenes. 16 This means, in terms of our discussion below,
that we will describe more explicitly the grammatical environments that
correlate with irrealis and presupposition, assuming then that realis is freely
distributed 'elsewhere', in all other environments.
The status of the habitual tense-aspect as an irrealis modality needs
to be somewhat qualified. All other things being equal, a habitual-coded
clause is just as strongly asserted as a realis-coded and thus shares an
important pragmatic feature of realis.17 However, the most important fea
ture of realis is that of occurrence at some specific time. Thus, while a
habitual assertion may be founded — as a generalization — on many events
that may have indeed occurred at specific times, it does not assert the
occurrence of any specific event at any specific time.
can could
shall should
will would
may might
Currently, the pairing of modals with the auxiliary 'have' imparts a sense of
'past':
174 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
Only for the pairing of 'can' vs. 'could' is the older distinction of pre
sent vs. past preserved to some extent. This is perhaps the reason why 'can'
— unlike 'could' — is incompatible with the perfect/past auxiliary 'have'.
That is:
(64) a. She can do it
b. *She can have done it
But since the old past form 'could' is used increasingly in non-past senses,
its past sense of 'could' is being supplanted by the past form of 'be able', as
in:
(65) She was able to do it
Another noteworthy fact concerning the use of the auxiliary 'have' to
render the past tense of modals is that such usage precipitates a shift in the
semantic range of the modal. The exact direction of the shift cannot always
be predicted. Thus, for example, either 'could' or 'may' can by itself be
used to signal any of the three modal senses — ability, permission, and
probability:
(66) a. Ability:
If she really tries, maybe she could/may do it
b. Permission:
If he behave himself, he could/may be reinstated
Probability:
Well, it could/may be true, right?
In contrast, 'could have' retains only two of the modal senses — ability and
probability. Thus, compare (66) above with, respectively:
VERBAL INFLECTIONS 175
(67) a. Ability:
If she had tried hard, she could have done it
b. *Permission:
If he had behaved himself,
he could have been reinstated
c. Probability:
Well, it could have been true, right?
There is nothing ungrammatical about (67b), but it does not convey a sense
of permission, only of either probability or ability.
In the same vein, 'may have' retains only the epistemic —probability
— sense of 'may', but neither its ability nor its permission sense. Thus,
compare (66) above with:
(68) a. *Ability:
*If she had really tried, she may have done it
b. *Permission:
*If he had behaved himself,
he may have been reinstated
Probability:
Well, it may have been true, right?
The loss of the deontic sub-modality of permission in the past may be
due to the fact that the use of 'can' and 'may' in that capacity in the present
probably involves the actual performance of the speech act of permission.
One of the most salient aspects of performed speech-acts is that they only
retain the performative force in the face-to-face communicative situation,
i.e. the here-and-now present.21
With four of the modals — 'might', 'could', 'would' and 'should' — the
combination with 'have' imparts not only the sense of past, but also a nega
tive or counter-fact sense. That is:
(69) a. She
(73) a. Command:
Turn off the light!
b. Request:
Could you please turn off the light?
c. Exhortation:
Let's turn off the light.
d. Yes-no question:
Did you turn off the light?
category N % N %
past/realis 2 2% 74 56%
irrealis 18 20% 8 6%
habitual 62 70% / /
progressive/realis / / 43 32%
perfect/realis 7 8% 8 6%
4.5.3.2. Perfectivity
Sharply-bounded, compact, fast-changing events are more salient both
perceptually and cognitively. They are thus likely to be better attended to,
memorized and retrieved.
VERBAL INFLECTIONS 181
4.5.3.3. Sequentiality
It is presumably easier to encode, store in episodic memory and
retrieve a chain of events that are narrated in a coherent sequence, as com
pared to an incoherent sequence. The strong preference in human com
munication toward sequential order in communicating events is most visi
ble in the case of temporal coherence and causal coherence. The strong pref
erence in text production and text interpretation is toward:
(82) a. Temporal sequence: earlier before later
b. Causal sequence: cause before effect
There is, in addition, an inherent temporal bias in complex, coherent
human action. Action sequences tend to come in routinized, culturally-
shared scripts or schemata. These schemata, as well as the general princi
ples used in constructing them, are part of our permanently-stored, com
munally-shared knowledge of the physical and cultural universe. Event
sequences that violate these schemata are harder to interpret, encode, store
and retrieve. Such schemata are so ubiquitous, and permeate our life to
such an extent, that we tend to ignore them as we do all presupposed
background information. Consider, for example, the normative script of
"frying bacon and making a BLT sandwich". The script is told first in the
normative order (83a), then in a scrambled counter-normative order (83b):
(83) a. He took the bacon out of the fridge, cut it, put it in a
pan, lighted the stove, put the pan on the stove, fried
the bacon to a dark crisp, drained it on a paper towel,
and made himself a BLT sandwich.
b. ?He fried the bacon to a dark crisp, lighted the stove,
put the bacon in a pan, cut it, made himself a BLT
sandwich, took the bacon out of the fridge, drained it
on a paper towel, and put the pan on the stove.
Culturally-shared scripts constitute an ever-present constraint on the coher
ence of text.
4.5.3.4. Relevance
There is a strong preference in discourse production toward recounting
events in an order that unites their relevance-time and occurrence-time.
182 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
This preference is the human communicative norm, as can be seen from the
low frequency of the counter-sequence perfect in both genres in table (81)
— 6%-8%. The relatively few events that are deemed relevant at some
other time — say speech-time ('present perfect') or some time after the
event ('past perfect') — are counter normative, thus a 'marked' case.
It may well be that detaching the event's relevance-time from its occur
rence-time constitutes an added cognitive burden on the speech receiver. In
processing an event that occurred earlier — at its natural script-point — but
is recounted off-sequence, the speech receiver may face a more costly
speech-processing task. The costliness of this task is perhaps due to the fact
that in the processing of off-sequence events, two separate but equally-valid
aspects of text coherence come into sharp conflict:
(a) The current relevance-point of the event
(b) The natural script-coherence of the event
In the vast majority of normal ('unmarked') cases, these two aspects of text
coherence go hand in hand. That is, an event is deemed relevant — and is
thus recounted — at its natural script-point (as in (83a) above). But a nar
rator may decide that an event is more currently-relevant at some off-
sequence point, one that diverges from the event's natural script-location.
When such an option is exercised, the two aspects of text coherence are
brought into sharp conflict. Such a conflict presumably incurs added cogni
tive costs.
optional. But if more than one occurs, their relative order is rigid; so that a
modal can only precede 'have' or 'be' but never follow either; and 'have'
can only precede 'be' but never follow it.
A special provision must be made for 'past', since it is not an indepen
dent auxiliary word, but rather a suffix. Placing 'past' as the first element of
the auxiliary is a mere notational convention that allows us to formulate the
rules for the morphology of tense-aspect in English in the most general
way:
(85) "The past tense must attach itself as suffix to the first VP
element that follows it, be it an auxiliary (AUX) or the
main verb (V)".
In order to interpret rules (84b)/(85) without exceptions, one must
assume that the modals 'could', 'should', 'would' and 'might' are past forms
of, respectively, 'can', 'shall', 'will' and 'may'. While this was indeed the
historical fact, it is not true any more. These so-called 'past' forms have
diverged in their meanings, so that their use need not connote any past
tense. Often, the use of the old past form seems to connote a lower degree
of epistemic certainty.37 Thus contrast:
(86) a. He may come tomorrow (more certain)
b. He might come tomorrow (more dubious)
c. can still do it
(>and may yet)
d. He could still do it
(>though I doubt it)
In other cases, as in 'will'/'would' and 'shall'/'should', the semantic
divergence between the two forms is even more advanced. Further, for
some pairs both members may combine with 'have' to yield a past-related
epistemic sense, with the same epistemic gradation as in (86) above. That
is:
(87) a. He may have done it (less doubtful)
b. He might have done it (more doubtful)
In other cases, the combination with 'have' yields a different meaning
altogether, as in:
184 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
'Have 1 , '(have) got' and 'need' can be used to signal the evaluative
modality of necessity or obligation. Semantically, they thus fit the same slot
as the English modals. Syntactically, however, these three new modal
auxiliaries still behave like main modality verbs such as 'want'. Thus com
pare:
(100) Modality verbs:
a. She wants to rest
b. She has to rest
She's got to rest
d. She needs to rest
(101) True modals:
a. She can rest
b. She must rest
She should rest
Much like 'want', 'have' (but not 'need' or 'have got') can combine
with the perfect auxiliary 'have', as in:
(102) a. She has want-ed to rest
b. She has ha-d to rest
c. *She has need-ed to rest
The reduced colloquial invariant form 'got' can of course combine with
'have', but that simply reiterates its historical point of origin, which how
ever has no equivalent simple-present form:
(103) a. She has got to rest
b. *She get(s) to rest
Like 'want' and several other stative modality verbs, 'need', 'have' and
'(have) got' cannot combine with the progressive auxiliary 'be':
(104) a. *He is want-ing to leave
b. ?He is hav-ing to leave
c. *He is need-ing to leave
d. *He is got-ing to leave
Like 'want', both 'have' and 'need' (but not '(have) got') can com
bine with modal auxiliaries:
(105) a. She may want to leave
b. She may need to leave
She may have to leave early
d. *She may (have) got to leave early
VERBAL INFLECTIONS 187
4.7. NEGATION
4.7.1. Negation and logic
Among the four main propositional modalities, the status of NEG-
assertion is somewhat muddled. Logicians have traditionally considered
negation only in terms of truth value; that is, as an operator that 'reverses
the truth-value of a proposition', This may be captured in the strict rules of
logic:
(108) a. NOT(NOT-P) = Ρ
b. If Ρ is true, then NOT-P is not true
(and vice versa)
Rule (108a) allows for the NEG-operator to cancel itself without any
effect on the proposition (P) under its scope. Rule (108b) is the celebrated
law of the excluded middle that bars logical contradictions.
The logical properties of negation are indeed reflected in language, but
188 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
died'. A negative assertion is indeed made on the tacit assumption that the
hearer either has heard about, believes in, is likely to take for granted, or
is at least familiar with the corresponding affirmative proposition.
The corresponding affirmative may be established explicitly in the pre
ceding discourse as background for a NEG-assertion, as in:
(112) Background: Joe told me that he won ten grand in the
lottery...
NEG-assertion: ...tho later I found out he didn't
In (112), it is the speaker who sets up the expectation of the corresponding
affirmative, then contradicts it with the negative. But the background
expectations may be contributed by the interlocutor, as in:
(113) Background: A: I understand you're leaving tomorrow.
NEG-assertion: B: No, I'm not. Who told you that?
The speaker may also rely, in assuming background expectations, on
specific knowledge about the hearer's state of affairs or state of mind. To
illustrate this, consider the felicity of the three responses to the NEG-asser
tion below:
(114) A: So you didn't leave after all.
B: (i): No, it turned out to be unnecessary.
(ii): Who said I was going to leave?
(iii): How did you know I was going to?
B's response (114i) suggests that the ('hearer') is going along with A's
('speaker's') presupposition of the corresponding affirmative as shared
information. Response (114ii), on the other hand, suggests that believes
A must have been misled. Finally, in response (114iii) registers surprise
at how the information leaked out to A, by inference thus conceding that A
indeed had it right.
The background expectations associated with a NEG-assertion can
also be traced to generic culturally-shared information. Consider:
(115) a. There was once a man who didn't have a head
b. ?There was once a man who had a head
?There was once a man who didn't look like a frog
d. There was once a man who looked like a frog
The reason why the negative in (115a) is pragmatically felicitous is because
it reports a break from the norm. The reason why (115b) is pragmatically
190 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
odd is because it merely echoes that norm, and is thus a tautology. Con
versely, the negative in (115c) is a tautology that re-phrases the norm, and
is thus pragmatically odd; while the affirmative (115d) breaks the norm,
and is thus pragmatically felicitous. Now, if we lived in a universe where
men had no heads, or where they most commonly resembled frogs, both
felicity contrasts in (115) would have been reversed.
text N % N % N %
The higher frequency of NEG-clauses in the fiction text in (116) may be sig
nificant. It may have to do with the fact that fiction contains conversational
interaction, in which the perspective of several speakers alternates. The
shift of perspective is a natural venue for valuative conflict and epistemic
disagreement. In contrast, non-fiction is written from the perspective of a
single speaker, whose goal and knowledge-base are likely to be more
uniform.
Ν % N % N % N %
The figures recorded in (133) suggest that none of the instances of VP-nega
tion allowed the inclusion of the subject under the scope of negation.
Rather, to place the subject under negative scope, only the NP-negation
form was used.
In addition to typically excluding the subject, VP-negation is often
used to further narrow down the portion of the clause that is being negated.
The most common way of doing this in English is by focused negation.
Focused negation involves placing contrastive stress47 on one element in the
clause. That element is then the only one falling under NEG-scope. The
rest of the clause is presupposed.
As noted above, VP-negation typically excludes the subject, and thus
applies only to the verb phrase ('predicate'). Such negation may be consid
ered the most wide-scoped; it can be now contrasted with the various exam-
198 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
c. Optional instrumental:
She didn't shoot him with the gun
( > She shot him, but not with the gun)
d. Optional purpose ADV:
She didn't flunk on purpose
(> She flunked, but not on purpose)
e. Optional time ADV:
She didn't come Saturday
(> She came, but not on Saturday)
f. Optional frequency ADV:
She doesn't visit often
( > She visits, but not often)
g. Optional locative ADV:
She didn't kick the ball out of the park
(> She kicked it, but not out of the park)
The inferences in (136a-g) are pragmatic and normative, rather than logical
and absolute. A change in the intonation pattern of the clause may yield
other inferences.
The reason why optional constituents attract the focus of negation is,
probably, because they are likely to constitute the focus of the assertion
itself, even without negation. The normal pragmatic inference concerning
the use of optional clausal constituents thus seems to be:
(137) "If an optional element is chosen, chances are it
is the focus of the asserted information".
Rule (138) only applies to the most common type of negation, VP-nega-
tion. The rule is to be interpreted as follows:
200 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
b. Affirmative:
Mary was happy, and Jack was happy
Negative:
Jack hasn't left
d. Affirmative:
Jack has left
e. Negative:
Mary isn't home,
f. Affirmative:
Mary is home,
b. Syntactic negation:
Mary wasn't happy, and Jack wasn't
204 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
c. Morphological negation:
Mary was unhappy, and Jack was
d. Inherent-lexical negation:
Mary was sad, and Jack was
b. Syntactic negation:
Jack wasn't present
c. Inherent-lexical negation:
Jack was absent
English. But as noted earlier, English also has another, less common type
of syntactic negation, whereby the NEG-marker attaches itself to one of the
non-verbal constituents of the clause, such as the subject, direct object,
indirect object, nominal predicate or adverb. In most cases, that constituent
turns out to be a noun phrase, so that we will refer to this negation pattern
as NP negation. As illustrations, consider:
(152) a. Affirmative frame:
The woman gave the book to the boy
b. VP negation:
The woman didn't give the book to the boy
c. Subject-NP negation:
No woman gave the book to the boy
d. Direct object-NP negation:
The woman gave no book to the boy
e. Indirect object-NP negation.
The woman gave the book to no boy
(153) a. Time adverb negation:
The woman never gave the book to the boy
b. Place negation:
The boy is nowhere to be seen
c. Predicate-NP negation:
She's no fool
d. Possessive-NP negation:
She's nobody's fool
In the more common VP negation, as in (152b), the propositional
event-frame of the corresponding affirmative (cf. (152a)) is taken for
granted as the presupposed background for negation. It is that background
proposition that is then denied. Constituent (NP) negation seems to attack
the presuppositional foundation of the hearer's contrary belief more
emphatically, and zero in on the object of denial more specifically: Not only
did the event not occur with the listed participants, but one of the partici
pants was not even involved. As a speech-act, emphatic denial of this type
is even more contrary than the normal VP negation. And the semantic
effect of such negation on the noun phrase in question is to render it non-
referring.50 That is, the denial is carried further — not only wasn't this
specific participant involved, but not even a member of its type.
The emphatic denial of the hearer's event-frame belief is pressed
206 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
For adverbs of time, place or manner, some points along this gradation may
be less natural, for reasons that have to do with reference.51 Thus compare:
(157) a. Syntactic VP negation:
She didn't work yesterday
b. VP negation plus emphasis:
?She didn't work any time
c. VP negation plus NEG pronoun:
She didn't ever work
d. NP negation:
?She worked no time
e. NP negation plus NEG pronoun:
She never worked
Emphatic constituent negation is probably at the bottom of the infa
mous double negation, commonly found in the spoken register, as in:
(158) a. I didn't see nothin'
b. I don't love nobody
I didn't go nowhere
d. I don't never drink
These are the colloquial equivalents of emphatic VP negation (cf. (155c),
(156c), (157c) above) in the written standard, respectively:
(159) a. I didn't see anything
b. I don't love anybody
I didn't go anywhere
d. I don't ever drink
Hybrid emphatic negation forms close in spirit to the 'double negation'
pattern (158) still lurk about even in more standard usage, as in:
(160) a. She saw nothing, not a thing
b. She loves nobody, not a soul
She didn't eat a thing
d. She doesn't love a soul
And one must remember that the proper negation pattern of current-day
written English did arise from the earlier pattern of emphatic double nega
tion in Old English. The transition involved two consecutive cycles of de-
emphasizing an emphatic VP negation pattern, roughly along the line of
(simplified):52
208 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
NOTES
1) Some people treat the 'habitual' as an aspect rather than a tense. This preference is moti
vated first by the fact that the habitual can distribute in both the "present" and the "past" tense,
as in the contrast between:
Present: She sings every day.
Past: Then she would sing every day.
It is also motivated by the semantic grouping of the 'habitual' with the 'durative' and 'iterative'
under the super-category of imperfective or unbounded. The problem with the distributional
argument is that the 'habitual' can also distribute in two aspects — "simple" and "durative", as
in the contrast between:
Simple: He works at a gas station.
(> What does he do for a living?)
Durative: He is working at a gas station.
(> What's he doing with himself nowadays?)
The truth of the matter is that the 'habitual' in English is a swing category, partly tense and
partly aspect. As we shall see later on, the habitual is also a swing category in terms of modality.
2) Given that aspect markers in English are always attached to the verb phrase of a particu
lar clause, we will consider the function — or any sub-function — of an aspect to be 'semantic'
if its definition requires no reference to entities (be they functional or structural) outside the
clause. In contrast, the definition of a 'pragmatic' function of an aspect requires reference to
entities outside the clause.
3) The contrast between bounded and unbounded is also referred to by the traditional terms
of 'perfective' vs. 'imperfective', respectively.
4) In the historical development of tense-aspect markers from verbs (the most common
source), many if not most tense-aspect markers arise from verbs of spatial motion ('go', 'come',
'arrive', 'leave') or spatial presence ('be', 'sit', 'stand', 'stay', 'lie', 'sleep', 'live-at'). For the role
of space-to-time metaphoric extension in the evolution of tense-aspect markers, see Heine et al
(1991). For the systematic use of space-to-time metaphors in English, see Lakoff and Johnson
(1980).
5) L'Amour (1962, p. 7).
6) L'Amour (1962, p. 2).
7) Alternatively, one may wish to argue that the progressive-habitual represents a widening
of the temporal scope of the progressive, from 'right now' to 'nowadays'. So that one way or
another, the combination progressive-cum-habitual produces an intermediate perspective on the
temporal scope of the event. As John Haiman (in personal communication) has suggested, this
would place the progressive and habitual on a continuum of a single aspectual dimension (rather
than one being an aspect and the other a tense).
8) The historical rise of auxiliaries out of modality verbs is still an ongoing development in
English, so that several modality verbs can be characterized synchronically as "aspectuals", with
intermediate syntactic properties (García, 1967).
9) I am indebted to John Haiman (in personal communication) for this suggestion.
10) L'Amour (1962, p. 7).
210 ENGLISH G R A M M A R
5.1. INTRODUCTION
Up to this point, we have dealt with noun phrases rather informally
when giving examples of subjects and objects, sometimes using pronouns,
sometimes names, sometimes nouns modified by various articles. In this
chapter we describe more systematically two central features of the gram
mar of noun phrases, features that most commonly control the use of vari
ous determiners that modify the noun. The functional domain associated
with this area of the grammar is that of topic identification, also called
referential coherence. This domain of grammar includes considerably
more than what we cover in this chapter. And in a number of subsequent
chapters we will deal with other grammatical constructions that either
belong to or intersect with this domain. 1
The two areas of referential coherence we will deal with here are refer
ence and definiteness. The grammatical devices most commonly used to
code these sub-domains in the English noun phrase are:
(a) Indefinite articles
(b) Definite articles
(c) Pronouns
(d) Zero anaphora
(e) Demonstratives
(f) Names
5.2. REFERENCE
5.2.1. Existence vs. reference
There is a long logical tradition in the treatment of reference, holding
that reference (also called denotation or extension) is a mapping relation
between linguistic terms (such as noun phrases) and entities which exist in
the Real World.2 In this tradition, a noun phrase either refers to an entity
214 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
in the Real World, or does not refer. To illustrate this approach, consider
first:
(1) a. The Queen of England is bald
b. The King of France is bald
In the logical tradition, the subject of (la) truly refers, since it maps onto an
entity that truly exists in the Real World. In contrast, the subject of (lb)
does not refer, since it maps onto an entity that does not exist. Similarly,
the object of (2a) below can, at least in principle, refer to an existing entity,
while that of (2b) presumably cannot:
(2) a. I rode a horse yesterday
b. I rode a unicorn yesterday
What is of course remarkable is that the grammar of English (and
other languages) tends to code the two subject noun phrases in (la,b), and
similarly the object noun phrases in (2a,b), with the very same grammatical
devices, and is thus seemingly oblivious to whether their respective refer
ents do or don't exist in the Real World. What the grammar seems to be
sensitive to is, rather, whether entities we refer to by such noun phrases
have been verbally established in the universe of discourse. Once an entity
has been established in the universe of discourse, it is treated as referring,
regardless of what its status may be in the Real World.
A discourse-participant is introduced into the universe of discourse,
and once introduced, it may be referred to by various grammatical devices.
The rules that govern both the initial introduction and subsequent reference
have little to do with real-world existence. Thus, the two alternative refer
ents introduced initially in (3a) below would be subsequently referred to
with the same grammatical devices in (3b,c,d,e,f), regardless of the fact
that one of them presumably cannot refer to an entity in the Real World:
(3) a. There was once
(11) a. Presupposition:
I know she met a man at the bar
b. R-assertion:
She met a man at the bar
In uttering either (11a) or (11b), the speaker is committed to the existence,
in the universe of discourse, of a specific man, the one she met at the bar.
Consider, on the other hand, the interpretation of the same indefinite
noun under the scope of non-fact:
(12) IRR-assertion:
She will meet a man at the bar;
a. ...he's been told to wait for her there.
b. ...she always picks up someone.
(13) NEG-assertion:
She didn't meet a man at the bar.
( > She met no man there)
In uttering (12), with an irrealis modality, the speaker may have in mind
either the referring interpretation (12a) or the non-referring interpretation
(12b). The grammar will tolerate either, although real-world knowledge or
specific information may tip the scale toward one or the other. In uttering
(13), the range of interpretation is more restricted; only the non-referring
interpretation of the indefinite NP is allowed. We will return to this pecu
liarity of NEG-assertion further below.
The particular irrealis marker used in (12) above was the future modal-
auxiliary 'will'. But an indefinite NP can be interpreted as non-referring
under the scope of any irrealis operator in English. Thus consider:
(14) a. Conditional:
//she meets a man there...
b. Yes/no question:
Did she meet a man there?
Command:
Go meet a man!
d. Epistemic adverb:
Maybe she met a man there.
e. Modals:
She may meet a man there.
f. Scope of non-implicative modality verb:
She wanted to meet a man there.
218 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
ble the non-implicative verbs in (14f,g), or the non-factive verb in (14h). Such
verbs do not imply that a specific event indeed took place in the universe of
discourse; nor do they imply that an NP refers to a particular entity in that
universe.
real-world pragmatic knowledge may tip the scales toward either one
interpretation or the other. Consider:
(46) Context: -What did she call you for?
a. -She wanted to buy a house.
b. -She wanted to sell a house.
If 'she' is a private individual, chances are that when she is in the market to
buy a house, she will consider several houses before zeroing in on any par
ticular house. This pragmatic inference tips the scales toward interpreting 'a
house' in (46a) as non-referring. On the other hand, most private individu
als in this culture own only one house. Chances are that if they want to sell
'a house', as in (46b), it is a specific one, so that 'a house' in (46b) is
intended as a referring expression.
The pragmatic inferences that govern the probability of referring vs.
non-referring interpretations in (46) would of course change if 'she' were a
high-powered real-estate dealer. In that case, the probability of a non-refer
ring interpretation of 'a house' in (46b) will increase, since real-estate deal
ers tend to have several houses for sale. In the same vein, the probability of
a referring interpretation of (46a) will also increase. A high-powered dealer
may indeed buy houses for resale, but they tend to find bargain houses one
at a time rather than in large lots.
Consider next the following contrast, under the scope of fact:
(47) a. On the way home he bought a newspaper
b. On the way home he bought a book
All copies of a newspaper in the pile, and often all newspapers printed in
the same town on the same date, are interchangeable. Their individual iden
tity does not matter. For this pragmatic reason, 'a newspaper' in (47a) is
more likely to have been intended as non-referring, the scope of fact not
withstanding. In contrast, books tend to be put on the shelf judiciously, as
individuals. Their specific identity presumably matters. Chances then are
higher that 'a book' in (47b) was intended as referring.
Consider finally:
(48) I'm going to bed to read a book now
If I heard (48) announced by my old rancher friend, who keeps a pile of
dog-eared paperback westerns on the floor next to his bed, chances are I
would interpret 'a book' as non-referring. On the other hand, if I heard (48)
announced by my friend the philosopher, who chooses his reading material
228 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
rather deliberately, chances are I would have interpreted 'a book' as refer
ring.
Older prescriptive English grammars would insist on 'him' in (49a) and 'he'
in (49b). Colloquial American English, at the very least, has developed a
viable — and elegant — alternative, the non-referring use of the plural pro
noun 'they'/'them'.
The use of either 'he'/'him' or 'she'/'her' becomes more viable if the
non-referring antecedent is specified for gender. Thus consider:
there are some indications that the grammar of indefinite reference, in Eng
lish as well as in language in general, is more sensitive to the pragmatics of
reference. In this instance, what we mean by 'pragmatics' boils down to the
question of whether the referent that is introduced into the discourse, in the
case of indefinites for the first time, is going to be important in the sub
sequent discourse. In other words, we deal here with the cataphoric topical
ity of the indefinite referent.
This pragmatic aspect of reference is easier to demonstrate in informal
spoken English, where the unstressed demonstrative 'this' is used — con
trasting with the indefinite article 'a(n)' — to mark important referents
when they enter into the discourse for the first time. As illustration, con
sider the following letter to Dear Abby, one of the few venues where this
colloquial usage can be found in print: 4
(56) "Dear Abby: There's this guy I've been going with for
near three years. Well, the problem is that he hits me. He
started last year. He has done it only four or five times,
but each time it was worse than before. Every time he hits
me it was because he thought I was flirting (I wasn't). Last
time he accused me of coming on to a friend of his. First
he called me a lot of dirty names, then he punched my face
so bad it left me with a black eye and black-and-blue
bruises over half of my face. It was very noticeable, so I
told my folks that the car I was riding in stopped suddenly
and my face hit the windshield. Abby, he's 19 and I'm 17,
and already I feel like an old married lady who lets her
husband push her around. I haven't spoken to him since
this happened. He keeps bugging me to give him one more
chance. I think I've given him enough chances. Should I
keep avoiding him or what?
Black and Blue".
The following features in the use of the unstressed 'this' vs. 'a(n)' in (56)
are striking:
(a) The referring-indefinite participant introduced by 'this' recurs through
out the text and is obviously the most important participant (after T ) .
(b) The referring-indefinite participant introduced by 'a(n)' never recurs;
his specific identity is obviously incidental to the story.
(c) The only other indefinite introduced by 'a(n)' is a non-referring,
attributive noun.
232 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
5.3. DEFINITENESS
5.3.1. Definite reference and the communicative contract
As noted above, the contrast between 'referring' and 'non-referring'
NPs, whether semantic or discourse-pragmatic, involved primarily the
speaker's intent. In using the various grammatical devices available to code
reference in English, the speaker cues the hearer as to whether the NP is or
is not semantically referring, or whether it is going to be pragmatically
important in the subsequent discourse. Definiteness also involves the
speaker's own mind. But in addition it also involves the speaker's assump
tions about what goes on in the mind of the hearer. More specifically, defi
niteness pertains to a certain clause in the communicative contract between
speaker and hearer.
The clause in the communicative contract that concerns definiteness
has to do with the grounds on which the speaker may normatively assume
that a referent is mentally accessible or identifiable to the hearer. If the
speaker judges that the referent is indeed accessible to the hearer, the refer
ent (NP) is coded as definite. If not, it is coded as indefinite.
a. I, we you, y'all
b. this, these that, those
. now then
d. here there
(62) Pronouns
category subject object possessive
What the written forms of the pronouns do not reveal is that in fact these
are two distinct sets of pronouns — stressed and unstressed. Unstressed
('anaphoric') pronouns, as in (61c,h) above, are used under the following
combined conditions:
(a) The referent is continuous; and
(b) the identification is unproblematic.
The identically-written stressed ('contrastive') pronouns are used in the
context where:
(a) The referent is indeed continuous; but
(b) identification is problematic.
To illustrate the difference between the use of unstressed ('anaphoric')
and stressed ('contrastive') pronouns, consider:
(63) a. Unstressed:
Mary told Suzy, then she told Sally.
b. Stressed:
Mary told Suzy, then SHE told Sally.
Two referents in the first ('preceding') clause could be referred to by a pro
noun — 'Mary' and 'Suzy'. In both (63a) and (63b) the condition of con
tinuous reference is equally satisfied. But when the unstressed 'she' is used,
as in (63a), 'she' could only be interpreted as coreferent with 'Mary', which
is the subject of the preceding clause. When the stressed pronoun 'SHE' is
used in (63b), it must be coreferent with 'Suzy', which was the object of the
preceding clause. The stressed pronoun in (63b) thus affects a switch-of-
subject.
REFERENCE AND DEFINITENESS 237
Proper switch-of-subject:
Bill and Mary were there, but left before I...
Two separate issues concerning the proper use of pronouns are illustrated
in (64). First, the switch from a conjoined-NP subject to a single subject,
even when the single referent was a member of that conjoined NP, is con
sidered a switch-of-subject. Second, to affect a switch-of-subject success
fully, a stressed pronoun, as in (64c), must be used. An unstressed pro
noun, as in (64b), is not enough.
The use of the two pronoun forms — unstressed for unproblematic
subject continuity, stressed for more problematic continuation — is further
illustrated in (65), (66). The context is a bit more complex here:
(65) Unproblematic continuing subject:
Bill came in; he looked real tired.
a. He's an actor and works late.
b. *HE is an actor and works late.
(66) Contrastive continuing subject:
Bill came in first; he looked real tired.
Mary came in next.
a. SHE didn't.
b. *She didn't.
In (65) above, subject continuity is unproblematic. Only one referent could
be the antecedent of 'he', so that the unstressed pronoun is properly used in
238 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
(65a), and the stressed pronoun in (65b) is inappropriate. In (66), one refer
ent is introduced first and then referred to, appropriately, with the unstress
ed pronoun. The second referent is then introduced, and is then the sole
subject. What is more, the two referents are fully differentiated by gen
der, so that the use of the unstressed pronoun 'she' in (66b) ought to suf
fice. Nevertheless, (66b) is an odd use; and (66a), with the stressed pro
noun, is preferable.
What is most likely involved in (66) is thematic contrast. While 'Mary'
is indeed the continuing subject, the context directly preceding her entry
into the discourse had another active subject referent, 'Bill'. Further,
a thematic parallel is evident in discussing the same predication — 'be tired'
— involving both 'Bill' and 'Mary'. This is enough to suggest that the two
referents are indeed in contrast. And only the stressed — contrastive —
pronoun, as in (66b), can be used appropriately.
Similar contrasts may be seen in contexts when one of the participants
was the subject of the preceding clause, the other its object. Thus consider:
(67) Mary brought Bill over and we talked.
(71 ) "... Chief among the general causes of the decay of the Old
English apparatus of declensions and conjugations must
be reckoned the manifold incongruities of the system: If
the same vowel did not everywhere denote the same shade
of meaning, speakers would naturally tend to indulge in
the universal inclination to pronounce weak syllables
indistinctly... But beside this general cause we must in
each separate case inquire into those special causes that
may have been at work..." (1938, pp. 169-170)
In (70), both proximate demonstratives 'this' and 'these' refer backwards—
anaphorically — to different chunks of the preceding text. The singular-
plural contrast, of course, makes the identification of the different referents
that much easier. In (71), the proximate 'this' indeed refers backwards, and
to a relatively well-defined chunk of the preceding text. The distal
demonstrative 'those', on the other hand, refers to a chunk of text that is
not yet clearly defined. The issues may have indeed been raised in the pre
ceding discourse, and in that sense the referent of 'those' is anaphoric. But,
given that the referent is yet to be fully defined, one may argue that it is less
accessible.
The original spatial use of the demonstratives is in a sense being
extended in examples such as (70) and (71), but with the original configura
tion seemingly preserved: 6
(72) 'this'/'these' = 'near' = = > more accessible
'that'/'those' = 'far' = = > less accessible
[REFERENT]
[U]
~~[M]
CONTINUE CURRENT DEFER DECISION ON
ACTIVATION ACTIVATION
[anaphoric PRO] [full-NP]
[zero anaphora] [stressed PRO]
[name]
~------------
[M] [U]
IMPORTANT: UNIMPORTANT:
TERMINATE CURRENT CONTINUE CURRENT
ACTIVATION ACTIVATION
[articles]
[word -order]
[SUBJ, DO]
~ ~
SEARCH EXISTING - - _ a - ATTACH NEW REFERENT TO
MENTAL STRUCTURE; NEW TEXT-NODE
RETRIEVE REFERENT
ACTIVATE NEW
TEXT-NODE
[U] = unmarked
[M] = marked
246 ENGLISH G R A M M A R
NOTES
1) See in particular chapter 8 (de-transitive voice), chapter 9 (relative clauses), chapter 10
(contrastive focus), chapter 11 (marked topic constructions), and chapter 13 (interclausal con
nection).
2) Representative exponents of this view are Russell (1905) and Carnap (1959), inter alia.
3) This continuum is of course another indication that the discrete distinction of 'objective
reference" vs. "lack of objective reference" is incapable of characterizing reference in natural
language, where referential intent seems to be involved.
4) By most accounts, this usage penetrated American English sometime after World War II.
For a quantified text-based study of the contrast between 'a' and 'this' as indefinite articles, see
Wright and Givón (1987).
5) For this and other contrastive devices, see Chapter 10.
6) To the extent, however, that the referent of 'those' in (71) depends for its final clarifica
tion on yet to come discourse, its use has some quality of forward — cataphoric — reference.
7) John Haiman (in personal communication) suggests that sentences like:
Mary loves (most) lions.
I despise (all) drug addicts
Arc counter-examples here.
8) Many other grammatical devices that partake in the grammar of referential coherence will
be discussed in subsequent chapters. For more details of this cognitive overview, see Givón
(1990, chapter 20).
6 NOUN PHRASES
to the head noun, but typically do not change its inherent lexical type. The
central role of the head noun in the noun phrase may be expressed by the
following rule of semantic amalgamation of the noun phrase:
(1) The NP semantic amalgamation principle:
"Whatever semantic features belong to the head noun
also belong to the entire noun phrase".
The utility of principle (1) will become apparent when we examine the var
ious grammatical means by which the noun phrases are structurally unified,
or 'made to look like a noun'.
NP =
Rule (2) states that an English noun phrase can be either a pronoun (PRO),
a name (NAME) or a full noun phrase (NP!). The general rule that orders
the various optional modifiers relative to the head noun as well as vis-a-vis
each other may now be given as:
(3) Rigid order within the NP:
NP! = (QUANT) (DET) (AP) (Ν*) N (PL)
Rule (3) states that modifiers that precede the head noun are, in order,
quantifiers (QUANT), determiners (DET), adjectival phrases (AP) or
modifying nouns (N). Modifiers that follow the head noun are the plural
marker (PL), relative clauses (REL), possessor noun phrases (POSS-NP)
NOUN PHRASES 249
One quantifier, 'only', cannot appear with the possessive marker 'of'.
Another, 'all', may appear either with or without 'of'. Thus consider:
(6) a. only the woman
b. *only of the woman
all the men
d. all of the women
Finally, the quantifier 'all' is also problematic. Unless used with a defi
nite determiner (see (4), (6) above), it is inherently generic, or non-refer
ring. Thus compare:
(9) a. Generic subject:
All humans are created mortal.
b. Referring indefinite subject:
*A11 some humans are mortal.
Generic object:
She loves all men.
d. Referring indefinite object:
*She loves all some men.
ment. But here both elements preceding and following 'only' can attract
that scope. What is more, with the proper intonation, it seems that the final
element in the clause, an object NP, can also be stressed, and thus attract
the contrastive scope of 'only'. Mere adjacency, it seems, is not an absolute
requirement.
Finally, when two elements in a clause with 'only1 are stressed, only
one of them is under the scope of 'only':
(14) a. She could have only said this
( > 'it is possible that she only said
it but didn't really mean it')
b. She could have only said this
(> 'it is possible that she said
only this but nothing else)
In attempting to summarize the various constraints on the placement of
'only', the use of contrastive stress and the semantic scope of the quantifier,
one must admit the relevance of at least the following factors:
(15) Factors affecting contrastive quantifiers:
a. Stress: Only a stressed element can come under the contras
tive scope of 'only'.
b. Adjacency: All other things being equal, some effect of adja
cency can be observed, most strongly at the two
extreme positions of subject and object.
Left-right: A weak preference can be observed for the scope
of 'only' to fall on the element to its right (suc
ceeding) rather than on the one to its left (pre
ceding).
d. Object over subject: An object-scope quantifier seems to be
easier to 'float' toward the subject NP
than vice versa.
e. Morphemic status: Lexical morphemes are more likely to
take contrastive stress than grammatical
morphemes.
A suggestion implicit in the rather restricted case of 'floated' quantifier (cf.
(11a), (15d)) is that such a quantifier originally 'belonged to' or 'started in'
the object NP and somehow 'got displaced' and wound up in the subject
NP.
254 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
6.2.2.2. Determiners
We have already dealt, in chapter 5, with English determiners and
their use in the grammar of referential coherence. These determiners
include the definite article 'the'; the demonstratives 'this', 'that', 'these',
'those'; the indefinite articles 'a(n)', 'some', and the unstressed 'this' and
'these' (for informal spoken English only); and the non-referring articles
'any' and 'no'. In addition, pre-nominal possessive modifiers, either pro
nouns or full NPs, also function as determiners. This is true in two respects:
256 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
First, possessives occupy the same slot as other determiners in the NP. And
second, they are used as part of the grammar of referential coherence.
Examples of the various types of determiners are:
(23) a. Definite article: the woman
b. Demonstrative: that horse
this child
Indefinite article: a girl
some children
d. Non-referring article: any milk
no trouble
e. Possessive determiners : my boy
John's work
the woman's son
The best evidence that all these determiners belong to the same syntactic
class is the fact that only one of them at a time can occupy the determiner
slot. Thus consider:
(24) a. the my house
b. *my some children
*the that house
d. *this her room
e. *his that book
f. *no a solution
6.2.2.3. Adjectives
The adjective phrase (AP) follows the determiner but precedes the
noun in English. It may involve more than one adjective, as well as a mod
ifying adverb. The rule for an expanded AP slot may be given as:
(25) Adjective phrase (AP):
AP = (ADV) (ADJ*) ADJ
The optional constituent (ADJ*) signifies that more than one adjective
can appear in the adjectival phrase. When this option is exercised, the
order of the adjectives preceding the head noun is often rigid, although
rigidity may interact with the use of stress on one of the adjectives. To
illustrate this rigidity, consider first:
NOUN PHRASES 257
In examples (33), each modifying noun carries its own primary lexical
stress, and thus retains its independence as a lexical word. But a noun and
its modifying noun may also fuse to yield a unitary noun compound, as in:10
(34) Compound noun-noun constructions:
a. bird-house ("a house where birds live")
b. shoe-polish ("gooey stuff with which one polishes shoes")
riding-horse ("horse on which one rides11)
d. buffalo-gun ("a gun used to shoot buffalo1')
e. wheat-field ("a field where one grows wheat")
f. apple-core ("the core inside the apple")
g· mailman ("a person who delivers the mail")
Noun-noun compounds in English have a characteristic stress pattern: The
primary word-stress is invariably placed on the first noun in the compound.
That is:
(35) a. BIRD-house
b. *bird-HOUSE
c. MAIL-man
d. *mail-MAN
Compounds are not formed only with modifying nouns, but also with
modifying adjectives. In such cases, the characteristic compound stress-pat
tern tells the difference between a compounding and a modifying use of the
adjective:
(36) a. a black bird (= any bird that is black)
b. a black-bird (= a species of birds)11
a long house (=any house that is long)
d. a long-house (=a special house-type) 12
e. a white house (=a house that is white)
f. the White House (=the President's residence)
Once an adjective is placed in a compound, the meaning of the com
bined NP is not always the predictable sum of its parts. That is, having
become a fused lexical item, the meaning of the whole may change gradu
ally as a single word.
As can be seen from example (32) above, modifying nouns — whether
in compounds or not — cannot be separated from the head noun by an
adjective. That is, they must be placed closest to the head noun. This
260 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
and is purely semantic with possessive phrases. We will deal with the three
types in order.
and semantic-grammatical reality, compare the two uses of 'top' and 'front'
below:
(48) a. True possessive:
He surveyed the top of the house.
It was made of old cedar beams.
(> it = the top)
b. Pseudo-possessive:
He climbed on top of the house.
It was made of old cedar beams.
(> it = the house)
True possessive:
He measured the front of the house.
It was 30 feet wide.
( > it = the front)
d. Pseudo-possessive:
He stood in front of the house.
It was 30 feet wide.
(> it = the house)
In (48a) and (48c) above, 'it' refers only to the top and front of the
house, respectively. In both cases, 'top' and 'front' are the head nouns mod
ified by 'of the house'. In (48b) and (48d), on the other hand, 'it' refers to
the entire house; and 'of the house' is not a coherent semantic entity, nor is
it a coherent syntactic constituent modifying either 'top' or 'front'.
What the contrast in (48) reveals is that a semantic and grammatical
historical re-analysis has taken place in expressions such as (48b,d). The re-
analysis pertained to which noun is the head of the NP and which one is the
modifier. In examples (48a,c), the original possessive modifier construction
indeed retains its original semantic status. In (48b,d), historical re-analysis
has conspired to enrich the inventory of locative prepositions in English,
giving rise to new complex prepositions such as:
(49) a. out (of) the window
b. inside the house
behind the barn
d. at the bottom of the ocean
e. in the middle of the game
f. at the back of his mind
266 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
Some non-locative prepositions have also been derived via such re-
analysis, as in:
(50) a. instead of leaving
b. in spite of her anger
because of John
d. for the benefit of her audience
e. for the sake of her children
Some complex prepositions, such as 'inside' (49b) and 'behind' (49c),
have been simplified, losing both 'of and 'the'. Others, as in (49d,e,f), still
retain both 'of and 'the'. Others yet, such as 'out (of)' in (49a), display a
subtle variation between the presence and absence of 'of':16
(51) a. She threw him out of the house
b. *She threw him out the house
She looked out the window
d. ?She looked out of the window
The grammatical difference between the original post-nominal posses
sive construction and the re-analyzed complex preposition may be given by
the two tree diagrams below. Of the two, (52) corresponds to the original
modifier construction, and (53) to the re-analyzed complex preposition.
(52) True possessive modifier:
NOUN PHRASES 267
(60) a. Non-restrictive:
The thick, red, leather-bound book sat on the shelf,
untouched.
b. Restrictive:
Bring me the skinny red book on the top shelf.
(> not any other book)
Names, standing for unique entities, are sufficiently restricted in their
reference, so that they require no further restrictive modification. When
adjectives modify them, they tend to be strictly non-restrictive, and thus
become in a sense part of the name, as in:
(61) a. Alexander the Great
b. Gay Paris
Beautiful downtown Burbank
d. The ubiquitous Joe Blow
For this reason, names tend to be incompatible with strictly-restrictive mod
ifiers. Thus compare: 17
(62) a. ?This Alexander
b. ?That Paris
c. ?The first downtown Burbank
d. ?The second Joe Blow
e. Possessive:
His book didn't sell = = = > his didn't sell
f. Ordinal:
The first woman left = = = > The first left
In another pattern, the head noun is replaced by the unstressed pro
noun 'one' (for singular) or 'ones' (for plural):
(64) a. that one will not do
b. The poor ones suffer
c. *two ones came
d. *all ones withdrew
e. *his one didn't sell18
f. The first one left
The clause-initial frame "Speaking of..." establishes the more topical par
ticipant, and that is reflected in the preferred order in the following two-NP
conjunction.
Similarly, the tendency is strong to interpret (84c) as a single joint visit, and
(84d) as two separate visits, perhaps made at contiguous times. One may
say then that an NP conjunction with a single — thus totally unified —
preposition is used when the two events are maximally integrated. While
marking each of the conjoined NPs with its own separate preposition repre
sents an event that is only partially integrated. A natural implication of this
is that we may conceive of varying degrees of event integration, and repre
sent them through grammar as varying degrees of clause integration. In the
case of (84a,b) then, the full range would be:
(85) a. Separate events:
They gave the prize to Joe, they also gave one to Sally.
b. Semi-integrated:
They gave the prize to Joe and to Sally.
Fully integrated:
They gave the prize to Joe and Sally.
The two levels of clause integration, (85b) and (85c), may be given as the
two tree diagrams (86) and (87) below, representing the conjoined indirect
objects. Respectively:
(86) Semi-integrated:
When one continues with the conjunct, as in (93a), the pronoun is unstressed.
As with prepositions, one can observe three degrees of syntactic
clause-integration in conjunctions involving similar articles:
(94) a. Un-integrated:
The boys are playing in the yard,
and the girls are (also) playing in the yard.
b. Semi-integrated:
The boys and the girls are playing in the yard.
Fully integrated:
The boys and girls are playing in the yard.
NOUN PHRASES 281
(95) a. Un-integrated:
I saw your father,
and I saw your mother (too).
b. Semi-integrated:
I saw your father and your mother.
Fully integrated:
I saw your father and mother.
The maximally-integrated structures in (94c) and (95c) seem to be
further constrained by the semantic relatedness of the conjoined nouns.
Thus compare:
(96) a. I saw your father and your dog.
b. ?I saw your father and dog.
c. The boys and the dogs ran away.
d. ?The boys and dogs ran away.
The syntactic difference between the semi-integrated conjunction
(95b) and the fully integrated conjunction (95c) is given in the tree dia
grams (97) and (98) below, respectively:
(97) Semi-integrated :
When only two NPs are conjoined, the clause-initial 'both' creates the same
effect of lower event-integration as is created by 'either' or 'neither' in the
case of disjunction 'or'. Thus compare:
(109) a. Fully integrated:
Mary and John will come.
(> more likely together)
b. Semi-integrated:
Both Mary and John will come.
( > more likely separately)
(110) a. Fully integrated:
You can have tea or coffee.
(> possibly both, i.e. inclusive)
b. Semi-integrated:
You can have either tea or coffee.
(> you must choose, i.e. exclusive)
Similarly:
(111) a. Fully integrated:
He is coming for two or three weeks
b. Semi-integrated:
He is coming for either two or three weeks
In the fully integrated (111a), 'two-or-three' is a unitary compound. In the
semi-integrated (111b), 'two' and 'three' are more clearly exclusive of each
other.
When more than two NPs are conjoined with 'and', 'both' cannot be
used any more, since it is semantically restricted to 'two'. But the same
effect of semi-integration can be achieved by the multiple use of 'and'. Thus
compare:
(112) a. Fully integrated:
I saw John, Bill and Mary.
(> more likely as a group)
b. I saw John and Bill and Mary.
(> more likely individually)
The multiple use of conjunction words illustrate a general principle
that we will meet repeatedly throughout our survey:27
286 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
While the verb becomes the head noun in the nominalized NP, the various
other elements of the erstwhile clause — subject, object, indirect object,
adverbs or verbal complements — become various noun modifiers.
d. Determiners.
Both the subject and object may be converted into pos
sessive determiners, i.e. modifiers within the NP. In
addition, the whole nominalized NP may acquire a
definite or an indefinite article.
e. From adverbs to adjectives:
Manner adverbs in the finite clause are converted into
corresponding adjectives that now modify the head
noun in the nominalized NP.
We will discuss these adjustments in order.
When the nominalized clause codes a generic event with a generic sub
ject and non-referring object, the patient cannot claim the pre-nominal
genitive position, but only the post-nominal position. Thus compare:
(133) a. Knowledge of math (by the candidate) is required.
b. *Math's knowledge (by the candidate) is required.
The shooting of prisoners (by guards) is prohibited.
d. *Prisoners' shooting (by guards) is prohibited.
e. The burning of coal (by authorized personnel) may proceed.
f. *CoaI's burning (by authorized personnel) may proceed.
When the nominalized clause is intransitive and thus lacks a direct
object, the subject may occupy either the pre-nominal or post-nominal
genitive position. Thus consider:
(134) a. the city's growth
b. the growth of the city
Paul's escape to Malta
d. the escape of Paul to Malta
But while theoretically possible, the post-nominal placement of intransitive
subjects in nominalized clauses is severely constrained. For example, sub
ject pronouns can occupy only the pre-nominal genitive position:
(135) a. its growth (> It grew)
b. *the growth of it
her work with Walter (> She worked with Walter)
d. *the work of her with Walter
e. his coming home ( > He came home)
f. *the coming of his home
Not all morphological types of nominahzation in English yield the
same case-marking of subject and object. In the more finite nominahzation
with -ing, the subject (if expressed) is indeed marked as genitive deter
miner, but the object retains its finite-clause object form, as in:
(136) a. His destroying the city (was a shock)
b. Her leaving him for Harvey (was unexpected)
His having left the house (created quite a stir)
d. Sacking the city (, they then departed)
e. Having sacked the city (, they returned home)
NOUN PHRASES 293
And, in the even more finite to-infinitive nominalization, neither the sub
ject nor the object can take a genitive form. The object retains its normal
object form of finite transitive clause. And the subject (if present) is
marked with the preposition 'for', as in:
(137) a. (They wanted) to build the house.
b. (She told him) to build the house.
c. For him to build the house (was a mistake).
d. (All she wanted was) for him to build the house.
When the main verb in the nominalized clause is of a type that requires
a verbal — clausal — complement, that complement accompanies the verb
through the nominahzation with very little structural change, much like an
indirect object. A verbal complement thus becomes another non-prototypi
cal element in the de-verbal noun phrase, a potentially large post-nominal
modifier, now re-christened as noun complement. As illustration of some
such noun complements and their finite-clause sources, consider:
(154) a. He wanted to leave home = = = >
his wanting to leave home
b. He let go of the knife = = = >
his letting go of the knife
They attempted to cross back = = = >
their attempt to cross back
d. She made him wash the floor = = = >
her making him wash the floor
e. She told him to shape up = = = >
her telling him to shape up
f. She did it to save Joe = = = >
her doing it to save Joe
g. She wished that he would come back = = = >
her wish that he would come back
h. He discovered that she was blind = = = >
his discovery that she was blind
i. He shouted: "Watch out!" = = = >
His shouting: "Watch out!"
To understand the peculiar grammatical behavior of most post-nomi
nal modifiers, one must understand their relationship to finite verbal
clauses. In the case of post-nominal possessive phrases, we have seen how
some of them arise via nominahzation from subjects and objects of finite
clauses. In the same vein, all noun complements arise from verbal comple
ments of finite clauses, a subject that will be discussed in considerable detail
in chapter 7.
300 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
NOTES
A arbitrary code 25
ability 172, 173, 174 Aristotle 2, 85
abstract 55, 56 article(s) 60, 80
access (to subjecthood) 93 aspect 68, 147, 152
accomplishment 131 aspectual (verbs) 131
action(s) 90 aspectuality (adverbs) 74
action verb 105 aspectuals (progressive) 158
activation 244 associative 91, 92, 93, 115, 119, 124
active 93, 94 attitude, speaker's 169
active clause(s) 27 attended processing 4
active verb(s) 150 automated processing 4
adjectival phrase 248, 256, 261 auxiliaries 81
adjective(s) 55, 62, 76, 256, 257, 295 auxiliary 97, 149, 150
adjectives, derived 64 aversion verbs 134
adjectives, relative order of 257
adjective integration 283
adverb(s)51,76, 261 272,295 background information 181
adverbial clause(s) 177 behavioral program, closed 4
aesthetic functions 21 behavioral program, open 4
affected 122 benefactive 91, 92, 93, 121, 124
affectedness 100, 114 bi-transitive verbs 120
affirmative (clause) 27 Bonner, J.T. 12
affix(es) 48, 50 Bopp, F. 5
age 9 bound morphemes 48, 50, 58
agent 90, 91,92,93, 105 bounded (aspect) 90, 153, 154
agent of passive 291 bounded past 153, 155
agentivity 100 Bybee, J. 210
anaphoric pronoun(s) 228, 235, 236,
269
anaphoric reference 239 Carnap, R. 246
Anglo-Saxon 45 case-marking 291
animate 56 case-role integration 277
anteriority 162 cataphoric reference 239
antipassive 116 category labels 29, 31
antonymic pairs 64, 65 cause 110
312 ENGLISH GRAMMAR
propositional modalities 23 S
prototype(s) 52, 53, 91, 99, 100, 106, Sapir 53
117, 120 288 scattered noun phrases 270
proximity 154 scholarly jargon 15
pseudo-possessive(s) 264 scope, of quantifiers 251, 254
script(s) 279
Q semantic amalgamation 247
qualities 22 semantic ambiguity 31
quality 90 semantic criteria 51
quantifier(s) 81, 248, 249,261 semantic features 43
question(s) (WH) 177 semantic fields 43
question(s) (yes-no) 177 semantic reference 230
semantic rigidity 25
R semantic roles 90, 91
Ransom, E. 210 semantic structure 30
Real World 213, 214 sentence 29
realis (modality) 170 sequential 156
realis assertion 216, 217, 219 sequentiality 155, 181
reciprocal (verbs) 115, 119 simple clause(s) 26, 27, 89
reference 57, 213, 216, 242, 244 simple clauses, classification 99
reference, continuous 236 simple clauses, structure 143
reference, frame-based 234 simple past 163, 165
reference, gradation 224 simultaneity 155
reference, negative scope 224 simultaneous 156
reference, plurality 225 social status 17
reference, pragmatics of 226, 230, 231 society of intimates 13
reference, text-based 234, 235 society of strangers 13
reference, switch 236 socio-cultural function(s) 21
referential accessibility 232 sounds 25
referential coherence 213 speaker's intent 231
referential intent 215 speech community 7, 44, 233
referring 102,215,216,218 speech-act(s) 175
regional dialects 19 spoken language 13
relation(s) 22, 30 state(s) 22, 54, 90, 101
relative clause(s) 177, 248 stative copula 104
relative importance 275 stative verb(s) 150, 151
relevance 164, 181, 182 status 17
remote (aspect) 167 stems 50
remoteness 154 stress 48
repetitive (aspect) 158 stressed pronouns 235, 236
request 177 structural complexity 178
restrictive modifiers 267, 268, 269 structure 1, 30
Romance 46 subject 29, 58, 92, 105, 106
Ross, J.R. 301 subject agreement 68
rules of grammar 2, 3, 52 subject continuity 236, 237
Russell B. 246 subject pronoun 79
318 ENGLISH GRAMMAR