WORKBOOK FOR LINGUISTICS 200 (SPRING 2009) INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH GRAMMATICAL DESCRIPTION © 2008 MURRAY J. MUNRO All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the author. Table of Contents 1. What is grammar?..................................................................................................................3 2. Classifying Words.................................................................................................................10 3. Inflectional and Derivational Affixes..................................................................................20 4. Multi-word Verbs and Related Constituency Issues .........................................................29 5. Status of Verbs: Tense, Aspect, and Voice .........................................................................31 6. Using English Tense and Aspect..........................................................................................35 7. Mood and Modals .................................................................................................................42 8. Constructing Noun Phrases .................................................................................................44 9. Negation .................................................................................................................................46 10. Interrogation .......................................................................................................................47 11. More on Questions..............................................................................................................52 12. Clause and Sentence Types................................................................................................53 13. Some Examples of Subordinate Clauses...........................................................................54 14. Non-finite Verbals...............................................................................................................55 15. The Secret Life of Non-finite Verbals...............................................................................63 16. Noun Clauses.......................................................................................................................65 17. Restrictive vs. Non-restrictive Modification ....................................................................67 18. Identifying Errors Made by Second Language Learners..............................................69 19. Supplementary Material: Tense, Aspect, and Modal Sequences...................................73 2 1. WHAT IS GRAMMAR? For linguists, the study of grammar is the study of the structure of language. In its broadest sense, grammar covers a wide variety of phenomena including the sound system of a language, the lexicon, which consists of words and other meaningful units, and larger structures such as phrases and sentences. However, grammar also has a more restricted sense – the one that we will use in this course. When most of us think of grammar, we think of the structure of sentences. When we “do” grammar, we analyze this structure by parsing (identifying the categories to which words belong) and by describing how the words form recurring patterns that we call phrases and clauses. There are many different approaches to grammar. The sections that follow outline some of them. Descriptive Grammar The material covered in this course is presented from a descriptive perspective. We will describe English sentence structure by examining the ways in which proficient speakers of English use grammar. When we take this view of language, we do not think of utterances in terms of whether they are good or bad English. Instead, we are concerned with the ways in which utterances are commonly constructed. Grammatical sentences are structures that proficient speakers of English would actually say or write. In English, for example, determiners like the come before the nouns that they refer to. So we might say that a descriptive “fact” or “rule” of English grammar is that nouns precede determiners. If you compare sentences 1 and 2 below, you’ll notice that the first one conforms to that expectation, while the second one does not. For that reason we consider the first sentence to be grammatical and the second one to be ungrammatical. To denote an ungrammatical structure, linguists typically use an asterisk as shown. 1) The cat was sleeping by the door. 2) *Cat the was sleeping by door the. Sentence 2 above is ungrammatical because its word order doesn’t fit our expectations about the way English sentences are constructed. However, word order is not the only thing we need to consider when analyzing grammatical structure. Sentence 3 below is grammatical, while 4 is not: 3) She works at the bakery. 4) *She work at the bakery. The problem with sentence 4 is that it lacks a marker (-s) that is required in present-tense sentences with he or she as a subject. Still another example of ungrammaticality is illustrated by the following pair: 5) I ate all my dinner. 6) *I eated all my dinner. This time, the problem has to do with a particular verb form. The past form of eat is ate, not *eated. Children sometimes produce sentences like 6 when they are acquiring English, probably because they have recognized that many past tense verbs have an -ed ending. However, they eventually learn to produce the grammatical form ate. 3 While proficient speakers of English generally agree that sentences 2, 4, and 6 are ungrammatical, sometimes there are differences of opinion about other structures. One thing to notice is that the grammaticality of an utterance depends on the particular variety or dialect of a language that is being considered. In other words, a sentence that is grammatical in one variety of English may not be grammatical in another. For most speakers of Western Canadian English (WCE) the following are not grammatical: 7) *I might could get some eggs when I go to the store. 8) *This chair needs fixed. Sentence 7 is marked with an asterisk because WCE generally does not allow more than one modal auxiliary (a word like can, may, might or could) in a verb unit. Sentence 8 is also ungrammatical because, in WCE, needs requires an –ing form as its complement. Most speakers of WCE find both these sentences unacceptable and would be unlikely to ever say or write them. However, in some varieties of English, including dialects spoken in the southern United States, both of these sentences are grammatical, and a linguist attempting to describe those varieties would not mark them with an asterisk. In this course we will use WCE as our basis for deciding what is and what is not grammatical. We will focus on sentences that are clearly grammatical and will occasionally consider ones that are clearly ungrammatical. Sometimes speakers of a particular variety of a language like WCE may disagree on whether or not a particular sentence is grammatical. We will leave these debatable cases for discussion in other courses. One can approach descriptive grammar in a variety of ways. Linguists have developed many different types of labels and diagrams for sentences. Their variable approaches to grammar often make different assumptions about the nature of linguistic structures. In this course, we will take a traditional approach – one that uses fairly well-known labels in commonly-accepted ways. In fact, much of the terminology we will cover is similar to that used in books written for learners of English as a second language. However, if you take other courses about language structure, you will find that the terminology used to talk about grammar can vary, and that different principles of analysis are often assumed. Some approaches require a strict formalism: labels are applied in very particular ways, and tree diagrams are used to illustrate subtle structural phenomena. While the purpose of Linguistics 200 is to help you approach English grammar analytically, our goal is not to learn a particular formalism or to draw tree diagrams. Rather, we will aim at a general overview of English structures that should help you understand virtually any basic English grammar text. The existence of a wide variety of approaches to English grammar reflects the fact that linguists have not come to an agreement on the best way to characterize the structure of English – or of languages in general. If you are to be successful in this course and in other courses in language analysis, you will have to accept this fact. Prescriptive Grammar Prescriptive grammar entails the evaluation of particular ways of using language as correct or incorrect or as good or bad. People who take this view use their opinions about language to tell others how to speak or write. Someone who tells you not to end a sentence with a preposition or not to “split” an infinitive (as in “to quickly finish”) is prescribing, rather than describing language use. This is a very different way of thinking about language than the descriptive approach covered above. Descriptivists consider all structures that proficient speakers systematically use to be grammatical. (Of course, that doesn’t include sentences produced with speech errors.) Therefore, for descriptivists, ungrammatical structures are ones that people don’t use. Prescriptivists, on the other hand, take the view that even things that people regularly say or write should be judged as good or bad. Over