Descriptive Grammar

gramatyka opisowa

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Descriptive Grammar

gramatyka opisowa

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Karolina

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Symbols and notational conventions Bold face italics indicate lexemes (see 1.2). Ordinary italics are used for citing sentences, words and other forms (in orthographic representation). || obliques enclose phonological representations, indicating the pro- nunciation as opposed to the spelling J oblique is used to abbreviate examples: He allowed/refused me a second go isan abbreviation of He allowed me a second go and He refused me a second go. () parentheses enclose optional items: / know (that) she is here indicates that the that may be present, [ know that she is here, or absent, I know she is here. [J square brackets enclose relevant context for an example: [J wonder] if it is true represents the form if it is true considered as occurring in the context “I wonder <)> angle brackets enclose letters representing different speakers in a conversational exchange: (A) What are you doing? - Testing the chlorine level cites an exchange where What are you doing? is said by one speaker, Testing the chlorine level by another. * asterisk indicates that what follows is ungrammatical ~ at least in the construal under consideration. indicates that the grammaticality (or, if followed by *, the ungrammaticality) of what follows is questionable. are quotes’, e.g. for technical “> single quotation marks are used as * terms not previously introduced. *» double quotation marks are used to represent meanings, ROMAN SMALL CAPITALS are used for emphasis. ised for important technical terms when explained. Roman bold face is xixii Symbols and notational conventions : ’ ther The following abbreviations are used for syntactic classes, functions and © categories Adj adjective oO indirect object AdjP__ adjective phrase P predicator Adv adverb PC predicative AdvP adverb phrase Po objective predicative a clause Pc subjective predicative Comp complement FP preposition phrase Dep dependent Periph-Dep _ peripheral dependent Detnr determiner Pers person Detve determinative PI plural DetveP determinative phrase PossP possessive phrase Fem feminine Pred predicate Mase masculine Prep preposition Mod modifier s subject N noun Sg singular NP noun phrase TDC tensed declarative clause Neut neuter ¥: verb ° object vp verb phrase of direct object Phonological symbols Consonants /p/ asin pie /d3/ as in jaw /3/ asin pleasure fy tie ity few phy hill If die 10) thigh {m/ meat Ikf car /s/ see /n/ neat fof go I2f 200 Jn wing Mtf/ chew Ii shy it] run Vowels il asin pit [Af asin putt /eo/ as inpaired lef pet fof pot pl sofa fe] pat feof pole ” ‘| ‘ ehaithil intonation Precedes a syllable carrying ‘nuclear’ stress (main stress within an into} group) + indicates intonation with falling terminal, ¢ with rising terminal Cross-references form *... §3 Cross-references to another section of the same chapter take the fon a fe above/below’, while cross-references to a section in a different chapter ta form’... 4.3" (ie. section 3 of Ch. 4).Preliminaries The description of a language comprises three major components: phonology, grammar and lexicon. The phonology describes the sound system: consonants, vowels, stress, intonation, and so on. The two most basic units of grammar are the word and the sentence: one subcomponent of grammar, called morphology, deals with the form of words, while the other, called syntax, deals with the way words combine to form sentences. The lexicon ~ or dictionary, to use a more familiar term - lists the vocabulary items, mainly words and idioms (such as red herring, give up, and so on), specifying how they are pronounced, how they behave grammatically, and what they mean. In this book we will confine our attention to the grammar, with only occasional passing mention of phonological and lexical matters. On another dimension we can distinguish between the study of linguistic form and the study of meaning: all three of the major components are concerned with aspects of both. The special term semantics is applied to the study of meaning, and we can accordingly distinguish phonological semantics (covering such matters as the meanings expressed by stress and intonation), grammatical semantics (dealing with the meanings associated with grammatical categories such as past tense, interrogative clause, and so on) and lexical semantics (the meanings of vocabulary items). ‘The relation between form and meaning in grammar is by no means straight forward. This is one of the issues we shall need to consider in this introductory chapter, where the aim is to explain briefly the model or framework of grammat cal description that we shall be using in the book and the methodologi ‘al approach adopted. We begin with the question of how we can go about defining the various grammatical categories that will figure in the description ~ categories such as noun, subject, imperative clause, past tense, and so on: there will inevitably be a considerable number of them. 1. Grammatical categories: definitions and prototypes It is important to distinguish two levels at which our grammatical categories need to be defined: the language-particular level and the general level. At the language- 12 The parts of speech: a preliminary outline 1. Introduction A major problem in presenting the grammar of a language is that the various Categories are closely interrelated: one cannot give a definition of one category, at the language-particular level, without making reference to other categories. For example, it is a crucial property of nouns that they head phrases functioning as Subject or object in clause structure ~ and so on. We are dealing, that is to say, not with a set of independent categories but with a highly structured network of interlocking categories. The problem is then to describe such a network in step- by-step fashion. As suggested in the last chapter, the concepts of kernel clause and prototype are of major importance in this respect: they enable us to begin with the central and relatively straightforward cases, providing a base from which we can work progressively outwards. In similar vein J shall in this chapter Present a quick overview of the parts of speech, aiming to give simply a preliminary and inevitably rough idea of the categories, one that will then be considerably refined in the more detailed chapters to follow. At the primary level ~ ie. before we embark on subclassification ~ I shall dis Unguish eight parts of speech,? illustrated in (1) i [She] will (perhaps) say [i is (hers) Verb ii Tom (bought a] bottle [of] sherry Noun iii [The] new [captain was very] good Adjective iv [She] usually [says they are} very [useful] Adverb Y [A thick carpet) of {snow lay) on {the ground reposition vi The {boss had} a {chance t0 get) his revenge] Determinative vii [You can have fish] and {chips} or [stew] Coordinator viii [He says} thas [he asked] whether [it was free] Subordinator * Strictly, we should recognise a ninth, the interjection (hello, goodbye, blast, hurrah, shh, etc.) Interjections can, however, be omitted from an outline treatment: they are very peripheral to the language system and are not tightly integrated into the structure of sentences - they very often stand alone or have something of the character of an interpolation 222 Open and closed classes 23 In the first instance, we take the parts of speech to be word clas: in the sense of ‘class’ introduced in 1.3. It should be emphasised at the outset, however, that many words belong to more than one class. For example, better is an adjective in The film was better than Vd expected, an adverb in He played better than ever, and a verb in She's trying 10 better her time for the 5000 metres. Similarly, to take a commonly cited example, round can occur as any one of five different parts of speech: an adjective in They cut a round hole in the side, an adverb in She'll soon come round, a verb in Let's round it up to $100, a noun in She bought a round of drinks, and a preposition in She disappeared round the corner. A glance at a few pages ofa dictionary will give some idea of how widespread this phenomenon is. It follows that we cannot classify a given instance of a word by considering it in isolation: we need to examine how it is being used in that particular ins Normally, as in the examples given above, the context provided by the rest of the sentence will be sufficient to determine which part of speech the instance belongs to. But not always: Kim looked hard, for example, is ambiguous, with hard either an adjective (“Kim appeared to be hard”) or an adverb (“Kim looked intently”) Both words and lexemes can be assigned to part-of-speech classes. In You should take more care, 1 took the bus, It takes to0 long, the words take, took and takes are verbs, and we likewise classify the lexeme of which they are inflectional forms, namely take, as a verb. As far as English is concerned, there are grounds for giving priority to the classification of words, with the classification of lexemes derivative therefrom. We will see that for the most part inflection provides at best only a subsidiary criterion of classification. It is only for verbs that inflectional contrasts constitute the most salient defining property. For the rest, greater weight will be attached to ‘combinatorial’ properties, the way items combine to form larger units, ultimately sentences ~ and in the first instance it is words that combine to form sentences: the lexeme is an abstraction from a set of words. Many words, moreover, are not forms of lexemes at all, because they carry no inflectional property ~ words like beautiful, quickly, there, in, and, etc. The great majority of lexemes are verbs, nouns or adjectives; the preposition, coordinator and subordinator classes apply exclusively to words, while the adverb and determinative classes apply predominantly to words: there are just a handful of adverb lexemes and one or two determinative lexemes. We will take the view (again restricting our attention to English) that the inflectional forms of any lexeme all belong to the same part of speech, so that there is no conflict between the word and lexeme classification: for example short, shorter, and shortest, the three forms of the adjective lexeme short, all belong to djective, and analogously for the other parts of speech lance. the word class a 2. Open and closed classes The parts of speech can be divided into two major sets, commonly called open classes and closed classes. The open classes are verb, noun, adjective and adverb, the closed classes the rest: preposition, determinative, coordinator and subordinator. The open classes have very large membership, while the closed ones have24 The parts of speech: a preliminary outline relatively few members; a large grammar could be expected to list all members of the closed classes, whereas for the open ones we would be referred to the lexicon. The distinction between open and closed applies not just to primary classes but also to subclasses, For example, we shall subclassify nouns as common nouns, proper nouns or pronouns ~ so that in Tom gave her the keys, for example, keys (key) is a common noun, Tom (Tom) a proper noun, and her (she) a pronoun. Of these three subclasses the first two are clearly open, while the third, the pronoun, is closed. Open classes are so called because they readily accommodate the addition of new members as the vocabulary of the language adapts itself to the changing needs of its speakers. New members may arise through the application of various morphological processes to existing words (as with the verb hospitalise derived from the noun hospital by suffixation ~ see 1.6), through borrowing from another language (as with the noun sputnik, from Russian) or, though this is very much rarer, through creation of a new word from the phonological resources of the language, as with the noun ny/on, coined in the 1930s. Closed classes, by contrast, are highly resistant to the addition of new members — though the term “closed” should not be taken to imply that such expansion is strictly impossible. As far as grammatical analysis is concerned, the open classes (and subclasses) are a good deal more straightforward than the closed. The set of closed primary classes proposed here differs quite considerably (in ways that will be pointed out) from that found in traditional grammars, and numerous other schemes can be found in the literature. But it is scarcely conceivable that anyone could propose a grammar that did not contain classes corresponding fairly closely to our verb, noun, and adjective. Differences will be found in the treatment of adverbs, but this reflects the fact that the traditional adverb class covers a number of subclasses of which some are closed: the differences tend to be associated with these rather than with the central open subclass containing words like carefully, quickly, surreptitiously, etc. 3. Words and phrases We are taking the parts of speech categories to be classes of words (or, in certain cases, of lexemes): we will not apply them to expressions larger than a word.” Thus in keeping with the conception of constituent structure outlined in 1.3, we will make a systematic distinction between the classification of the minimal syntactic units, the words, and that of the units higher in the constituent hierarchy. The classification of phrases, however, reflects that of the word functioning as. head. In our original example, The boss made a bad mistake, the phrases the boss and a bad mistake are classified as noun phrases by virtue of having a noun, boss or mistake, as head, while made a bad mistake is a verb phrase as its head is the verb made, Corresponding phrase classes are found for all four of the open word * Except for certain fixed and syntactically unanalysable expressions like each other, which is best treated as belonging to the class of nouns (more specifically, the subclass of pronouns).3 Words and phrases 25 classes verb, noun, adjective and adverb, and also for preposition and determinative among the closed classes. The correspondence is shown in the following examples, where the unbracketed expression is the phrase under consideration and the head word is underlined: Phrase Head Word (2) i (Tom) used the wrong method ve v ii Several new cracks [had appeared in the wall] NP ON (They were] kind to her AdjP Adj [She spoke] t00 slow AdvP Adv v_ [They presented her] with a magnificent bouquet PP Prep vi [He had} very little (patience) DetveP Detve Coordinators and subordinators, by contrast, do not function as heads of phrases, and there are accordingly no phrase classes corresponding to them. The head is the syntactically dominant element in the phrase, while the dependents are subordinate. This difference in status is reflected in the following ways: (a) Dependents are often syntactically optional, whereas the head is obligatory (except in the special case of ellipsis). In (ii), for example, we could omit the dependents several and new without loss of grammaticality to give Cracks [appeared in the wall]. Similarly in (iii), (iv) and (vi). But not in (i) and (v), where the dependents the wrong method and a bouquet are not omissible: optionality is not a necessary condition for dependent status but (again leaving aside ellipsis) it is a sufficient one. The qualification concerning ellipsis is needed to cater for examples like [He gave me a glass of red wine but I'd have preferred] white wine, where white wine could (and more often than not would) be reduced to white, with ellipsis of the head wine. Omission through ellipsis is quite different in kind from that illustrated above for the missing element is understood, recovered from the context, even though not overtly expressed; elliptical constructions will be described derivatively, in terms of their differences from corresponding ‘complete’ constructions (cf. 1.4), whereas Cracks appeared in the wall, for example, is grammatically perfectly complete as it stands. (b) The head is dominant in determining the combinatorial potential of the phrase as a whole. In cases like (ii) this simply reinforces point (a): several new cracks can occur as subject (as in (ii) itself), as object (as in I found several new cracks), as complement of a preposition (He was pointing towards several new cracks), and so on: it is easy to see that its ability to occur in these positions 1s attributable to the presence of the noun cracks, because cracks can stand alone in these positions. But we can apply this criterion also in cases like (i) where neither element in the phrase is optional. Used the wrong method is functioning as predicate to the subject Tom and although the verb used cannot occur alone in this function, there are many other verbs that can — compare, for example, Tom dis appeared. In kernel clauses at least, the phrase functioning as predicate always26 The parts of speech: a preliminary outline contains a verb and, if it is a verb of the appropriate kind, may contain just a verb - this justifies our taking the verb to be the syntactically most significant element in the phrase, the head. Similarly we might compare (iii), where kind is shown to be head by the optionality of to her, with [They were] fond of her, where of her is not omissible. We take the adjective fond to be head here because the phrase as a whole has the potential to enter into construction with verbs like be, become, remain, seem, etc., a function characteristically filled by adjectival, not prepositional, expressions. In (v) we cannot relate with a bouquet to a PP where the preposition can stand alone, for PPs (in kernel clauses) always have a complement as well as a head. Nevertheless, we can still see that the preposition with is head by the present criterion, because it is the with that determines that the phrase can occur as complement to presented: present in this construction requires a with phrase, ‘A consequence of this property is that it is very often possible to replace a dependent by a functionally equivalent expression of another class without affecting the combinatorial potential of the phrase as a whole, whereas this is not possible with the head. In [She] knew the outcome, for example, we can replace the NP the outcome by a subordinate clause such as thar he was guilty, whereas we cannot replace the head knew by a non-verb. Similarly, in [You're dealing with] a man without scruples the dependent without scruples, a PP, is replaceable by a clause such as who has no scruples, but no comparable replacement is possible for the head man The concept of ‘phrase’ adopted in this book differs somewhat from that found in traditional grammar. A phrase is to be understood as a type of construction containing a head element optionally accompanied by one or more dependents. Because the dependents are very often optional, the head may stand alone. The head-based concept of phrase, unlike the traditional one, thus allows for a phrase to consist of a single word. In John made a bad mistake for example, we will say that the subject position is filled by a noun phrase consisting of a noun (function~ ing as head of the phrase): John is analysed as both a noun phrase and a noun. It is simpler to handle the choice between the boss and John (or between another John and John) at just one place in the grammar, that dealing with the structure of the noun phrase, than to have to account for it in the description of all the vari~ ‘ous constructions in which such expressions occur ~ than to say, for example: (0) the subject can be either an NP (The boss made a bad mistake) or a noun (John ‘made a bad mistake; (B) the direct object can be either an NP (J saw the boss) or a noun (/ saw John); (y) the complement of a proposition can be either an NP (He threw it at the boss) or a noun (He threw it at John); ~ and so on for all the other functions that can be filled by such expressions. For the same reason we will slightly revise our analysis of The boss made a bad mistake in 1.3 in such a way that bad will be an AdjP as well as an adjective. The head-based concept of phrase also allows for a phrase to have another phrase, rather than a word, as its head. Thus in a subject + predicate construction, we take subject to be a special case of dependent, and predicate of head, Note, with respect to the criteria introduced above, that while the predicate of a4 The open classes 27 kernel clause is always filled by a VP the subject can be either an NP or a subordinate clause (recall the earlier contrast between The decision [surprised everyone] and That he was allowed to stay on {surprised everyone]) ~ with the possibility of a subordinate clause being dependent on the selection of an appropriate VP (compare *That he was allowed to stay on ceased). A clause is accordingly a special kind of phrase.* But not all syntactic constructions are phrases. In particular, coordinative constructions are not. In Either he is ill or he has forgotten the appointment, for example, either he is ill and or he has forgotten the appointment are of equal syntactic status: neither is superordinate to the other, so that neither is head and the whole is for this reason not a phrase. 4. The open classes We will turn now to an outline account of the properties that characterise the eight parts of speech, beginning in this section with the four open classes verb, noun, adjective and adverb, For each of these four, we will give the properties under four headings: («) FUNCTION: what are the characteristic functions within a phrase of the words belonging to a given class, and what are the functions within larger constructions of the phrases they head? (B) DePenvents: what kinds of dependents do they take within the phrases they head? (y) INFLECTION: what inflectional systems apply? (0) LexicaL MORPHOLOGY: what are the most salient morphological processes for deriving lexical stems of one class from those of another? The last two are ‘internal’ properties: they have to do with the make-up of the word itself, its inflectional properties or derivational affixes and the like; the first two, by contrast, are ‘external’: they have to do with the way the word combines with others in larger constructions. Although we will consider each open class under all four headings, we will vary the order somewhat so as to reflect the variation in the relative importance they have: inflection, for example, is of prime significance for the verb but of very minor significance for the adverb. 4.1 Verbs (a) Inflection. The great majority of verb lexemes have a paradigm containing six inflectional forms, illustrated for take in [He/They] took (great care] Past tense [He] takes [great care] 3rd pers sg present tense [They] take [great care] General present tense [He/They should} take [great care} Base form Vv [He is/They are] taking [great care] Present participle vi [He has|They have] taken [great care] Past participle > Again this departs from the much more restricted use of the term ‘phrase’ found in additional grammar.ag The parts of speech: a preliminary outline ‘The verb paradigm will be explained in detail in Ch. 3; here we will confine our- selves to a few initial observations = It will be noted that the word fake occurs twice in (3): as the general present tense form and as the base form. Where two or more inflectional forms are pronounced and spelled the same, we say that there is syneretism between them (or ott they are syncretised). Syncretism between the base form and the general present tense is found inthe paradigm of virtually all verbs: ony for be (which in fact has more than six forms in its paradigm) do we find such a contrast as tween [They] are [very careful] (present tense) and [They should] be [very careful) (base form). Walk and all other regular verbs, together with a good number of irregular ones, such as buy, also have syncretism between the past tense form (They walked there, He bought id) and the past participle (They had walked there, We nat bought it). A small handful of verbs like shut have syncretism between four inflectional forms: past tense, past participle, general present tense and base : shut. tor iyo within the paradigm is between the tensed and non-tensed forms. It is the tensed forms that are most distinctively verbal and we may regard the prototypical verb word as tensed. With the single exception of beware, all verb lexemes have tensed forms, whereas there are a number of very frequent verbs _ the ‘modal operators’ can, may, must, will, etc. ~ which lack non-tensed forms. All kernel clauses contain a tensed verb as predicator (b) Function. Tensed verbs have the distinctive property of functioning as the ultimate head of kernel (and many kinds of non-kernel) clauses; as head, they restrict the range of other elements in the clause, so that we have, for example, He took it but not *He arrived it, He seemed anxious but not *He used anxious, and so on, Base forms head VPs functioning as head (predicate) in various kinds of non-kernel, often subjectless clauses ~ for example, imperative clauses (Open the door, Be careful), clauses functioning as complement to the modal operators can, may, etc. ({She may] be here soon), clauses marked by the infinitival particle to (i is important] to read both versions),* and so on. Participles likewise head VPs in predicate function in non-kernel clauses ~ for example, after ‘progressive’ be ((She was] working), ‘perfect” have or ‘passive’ be (They had] seen us, [He was] seen by the guard). This we will call the ‘predicator” use of participles, contrasting with their ‘attributive’ use, where the VP functions as modifier in NP structure ({the} fiercely boiling {kettle}, {a] rarely heard {work by Purcell}). Participles are not as clearly distinct from adjectives and nouns as are the other forms of verbs. (c) Dependents. Verbs take a wide range of dependents. They differ from the other open classes, for example, in that a subclass of them ~ transitive verbs + Verb lexemes are traditionally cited by means of this so plus the base form ~ thus take as ‘ro take’, be as*to be’, etc. Infinitival 10, like the 10 of J went 10 Paris, is traditionally analysed as a preposition, but this reflects its historical origin, not its behaviour in Modern English; it differs syntactically from other words so much that it cannot be illuminatingly assigned to any of the parts of speech,4 The open classes 29 take objects as dependents: recall the contrast drawn in 1.1 between [The boss had watched the secretary) destroy the files, with destroy a verb, the files its object, and [The boss had witnessed] the destruction of the files, with destruction a noun and thus requiring a preposition before the files. (d) Lexical morphology. Many verbs, nouns and adjectives have simple lexical stems, but it is a measure of the importance of the distinction between them that there are numerous morphological processes for deriving stems of one class from those of another. The most productive verb-forming affix is -ise as in de-adjectival nationalise, or denominal hospitalise; among the less productive ones are -ify, -e", be-, as in de-adjectival beautify, sadden, becalm. 4.2 Nouns (a) Function. Nouns most characteristically function as head in NP structure; NPs in turn occur in a variety of functions, notably subject, object, predicative (complement of verbs like be, seem, become, remain, etc.) and complement of a preposition (such as of, 10, with, at, by, etc.): (4) i A dog [was barking] Subject ii [She bought] a dog Object iii [That's] a dog Predicative iv [Iwas attacked by] adog Comp of preposition NPs also occur in the possessive construction that we will be taking up later in this chapter: The dog’s {tail was wagging furiously (b) Dependents. Nouns take a different range of dependents than other parts of speech. Most distinctively, they take as pre-head dependents determinatives like the, a, some, few, my, ete., and adjectives: the table, a cup, some problems, my cousin, good ideas, a big increase, some bad mistakes. Itis also distinctive of nouns that they take ‘restrictive relative clauses’ as posthead dependents: she man who came to dinner, the book that he was reading, a box in which he kept his valuables. (c) Inflection. Prototypical nouns enter into inflectional contrasts of number, singular (dog, goose) vs plural (dogs, geese). However, whereas virtually all verbs have contrasting tense forms, there are many nouns without a contrast of number: equipment, muck, wetness and the like have no plural counterparts, while a few, such as alms, dregs, remains, have no singular counterparts. It is for this reason that we attach greater weight to the external properties of nouns than to inflection. (d) Lexical morphology. Among the most frequent noun-forming suffixes are -ness (of very great productivity) and -(i)iy, deriving de-adjectival nouns like politeness, loyalty, and -er, -ee, -ation, -ment, etc., deriving deverbal nouns like driver, payee, organisation, abandonment.30 The parts of speech: a preliminary outline 4,3 Adjectives (a) Function. Adjectives function as head in AdjP structure. The two main func. tions of AdjPs are predicative in VP structure and pre-head modifier in NP struc. ture, the latter involving what is called the attributive use of adjectives: (5) i [The coat seemed] t00 large Predicative use [an] unusually large [deficit] Attributive use “The great majority of adjectives can be used both predicatively and attributively. (b) Dependents. Most adjectives are “gradable’, Semantically this means that they denote properties, etc., that can be possessed in varying degrees; syntactically it is reflected in their ability to take degree expressions as dependents: 100 large, quite good, very young, rather doubtful. Degree modification is possible with some Verbs and nouns (cf. / very much liked it, an enormous improvement) but there are differences in the modifying expressions found with the three classes: notably, very (in the sense “to a large degree”) and ‘vo (in the sense “to an excessive de~ gree”) do not modify verbs or nouns ~ compare (6) i [He was] very/too young Adj ii *[He had] very/too loved {her} v iii *a very/t00 deficit N By no means all adjectives are gradable, so that the present property is very much secondary to function. Non-gradable adjectives typically denote ‘categorical” as opposed to ‘scalar’ properties ~ thus anthropological, female, phonetic, etc. (c) Inflection. Many adjectives inflect for ‘grade’, with a three-term paradigm, as illustrated in (7) for regular tall and irregular good and bad: a tall good bad Absolute tall good had Comparative taller better worse Superlative tallest best worst ‘This property is related to the last, comparison being a special case of degree specification. The comparative and superlative degrees may be expressed either inflectionally, as here, or analytically, i.c. by means of separate closed class words, in this case more and most ~ valuable, more valuable, most valuable. Longer adjectives allow only the analytic construction, while some allow either (cf. livelier/more lively, ete.). (d) Lexical morphology. There are a {air number of suffixes that characteristically derive adjectives from nouns: -ful (careful); -less (careless); -ly (friendly); -like (childlike); -al, ~ial, -ical, -ic ({al professional [footballer], professorial, philosophi~ cal, heroic), -ous (poisonous); ian, -ese ({a] Christian [burial], Japanese [literature)). There are others deriving deverbal adjectives: the most productive is -able (derivable).4 The open classes 31 4.4 Adverbs ‘The adverb is a much less homogeneous part of speech than the other three open classes. Adverbs, or rather the phrases they head, are found in a variety of functions but with very incomplete overlap between the subclasses that occur in the different functions. Thus although it is function that provides the primary defining characteristic of adverbs, the easiest route to an initial grasp of the class is probably through lexical morphology and it is accordingly with this that I shall begin. (a) Lexical morphology. A high proportion of adverbs are derived from adjectives by suffixation of -ly: carelessscarelessly, constant-constantly, frank- —sfrankly, and so on. It is primarily because of the highly productive nature of this process that the adverb is an open class; certainly there are far fewer adverbs with simple lexical stems than there are verbs, nouns and adjectives. ‘The -/y ending is neither a sufficient nor a necessary indication of adverb status. It is not sufficient because there are words of other classes ending in -1y, notably adjectives like beastly, cowardly, deadly, etc. It is, however, very easy to recognise these as adjectives by the functional property given above: they can be used attributively and predicatively, whereas -[y adverbs cannot ~ compare: (8) i [al cowardly [decision] ii [His behavior seemed) cowardly (9) i *la) carelessly (decision, ii *[His behaviour seemed] carelessly } Adjective } Adverb In (9) we need the form without -ly, the adjective careless, not the adverb care- essly. The -ly ending is not a necessary indication of adverb status because there are numerous adverbs not derived in this way; virtually all subclasses of adverb, however, contain -/y adverbs among their members, so that adverbs without this ending can generally be replaced by a -ly adverb without change of grammatical construction — witness [She was] very/exceptionally [strong], [She drove] well]carefully, [She decided) therefore|consequently (to reject it). This is a factor which gives some unity to the set of functions where adverb phrases are found. (b) Function. Adverbs generally occur as head in AdvP structure. AdvPs often function as dependent of the verb, especially as modifier/adjunct. In He behaved carelessly and She drove carefully, for example, carelessly and carefully modity the verbs behaved and drove respectively. AdvPs can also modify adjectives or other adverbs — so that verbs, adjectives and adverbs characteristically take adverbial modifiers, while nouns take adjectival ones: compare adverbial sufficiently with adjectival sufficient in Head (10) i [She] loved him sufficiently v iia sufficiently long delay Adj iii [She] spoke sufficiently slowly Adv iv a sufficient sum N32 ‘The parts of speech: a preliminary outline (c) Dependents. Many adverbs are gradable and take the same range of degree modifiers as adjectives: rather carelessly, too constantly, very frankly. The distinetion between adjectives and adverbs is thus primarily a matter not of the dependents they take, but of the functions of the phrases they head: see, especially, the contrast in (8)-(10). (d) Inflection. Although, as just observed, many adverbs are gradable, most of them enter only into the analytic comparative construction (carelessly, more carelessly, most carelessly). Just a few, however, inflect for grade, like adjectives: soon, sooner, soonest or fast, faster, fastest (as in He drove fast ~ in the fast car, by contrast, fast is an adjective). 5. The closed classes For the four closed classes, preposition, determinative, coordinator and subordinator, we will consider only external properties: with the exception of one or two items there is no inflection, and we find no lexical-morphological processes of any significant productivity. Moreover, it is only with prepositions that we carry over the distinction between ‘function’ and ‘dependents’: for the others the closed class. word does not, for the most part, function as the head of a phrase. 5.1 Prepositions (a) Dependents. Prepositions generally take NPs or clauses as dependent (more specifically, as complement): in+ the garden, because + it was raining; quite a number of them allow either type of dependent: after + the meal|they had eaten, since + his arrivaljhe arrived. The only other class of word taking NPs as complement is the verb, and verbs are easily distinguished from prepositions by their inflectional properties. (b) Function. Prepositions function as head in PP structure. PPs occur in a variety of functions, most notably dependent of a verb, as in [She relied] on the ‘minister, a noun, as in [the author] of the book, or an adjective, as in [similar] to the earlier version. 5.2 Determinatives Determinatives function as determiner in NP structure. The most central members are the, a(n) and words which are mutually exclusive with these: my, your, «this, these, that, those, some, any, which, etc. Thus we have the dog, my dog, ete,, but not *the my dog, *my the dog, and the like. We also include in the class certain words that can precede the central determinatives, such as all or both (all the money, both my parents) or follow them, such as every, many, few (her every gesture, the many mistakes). However, these last two ~ many and few — lie very6 Possessive expressions 33 much at the boundary between the determinative and adjective classes: both are gradable and few inflects for grade. 5.3 Coordinators The main coordinators are and and or. They can join units at all levels in the constituent hierarchy ~ notably clauses, phrases and words: (11) i Tews raining and didn't have an umbrella Clauses ii John and his father [were quarreling as usual] Phrases iii [You can go] with or without (a guide] Words There is no grammatical limit to the number of units that may be linked by a single coordinator ~ cf. Tom, Bill, Ed, Max, .... and Liz. Less central coordinators are bur, both, either, neither, nor, not. They are more restricted than and and or with respect to the above properties — and these words belong to the coordinator class in only some of their uses. The coordinator use is illustrated in [/ asked them] but (they refused], Both [Ed and Pat signed the letter], (She's arriving] either [tomorrow or on Tuesday], Neither [Tom nor {his father was at home}, [I bought it] not (for myself] but [for you]. And, or and but can occur as the sole marker of a coordinative construction, but the others cannot: both, either, neither and not require a following and, or, nor and bur respectively, while nor is a coordinator only when paired with a preceding neither. 5.4 Subordinators The central subordinators are shat, as in [/ know] that it is possible, and whether, as in [J wonder] whether it is possible. Their function is to mark a clause as subordinate: that it is possible, for example, is the subordinate counterpart of kernel /t is possible. That is the declarative subordinator, while whether is interrogative the non-subordinate counterpart of whether it is possible is Is it possible?. Subor- dinators have some affinities with prepositions, but an important difference is that shar is freely omissible in many environments (compare / know it is possible): it is for this reason that it is not analysed as head of a ‘subordinator phrase” There are two less central subordinators: ifand for. [fis a subordinator when it is equivalent to whether, as in (J wonder] if it is possible, but a preposition in its conditional use, as in I'l be furious if they're late. For is a subordinator when it introduces an infinitival clause (one where the VP contains fo +a verb in the base form), as in [Jt is necessary] for the water to be boiling; elsewhere for is a preposition, as in [/ made if] for you. 6. Possessive expressions To conclude this chapter we must consider briefly the various types of possessive expression, whose analysis presents a number of problems. Let us begin with examples like the king’s daughter or the King of Spain's daughter. Both of these34 ‘The parts of speech: a preliminary outline are NPs with the head position filled by the noun daughter and the determiner position filled by a possessive expression ~ the king's and the King of Spain's. The ‘sy element is what is known as a elitic, something which from a grammatical point of view is a word but which merges phonologically with an adjacent word as it lacks itself the normal phonological properties of a word ~ all ordinary words in, English contain a vowel. The possessive ‘sis not the only clitic in English, but it ig the only one which is not a reduced version of some ordinary word; the clitic ‘ve of I've finished it, for example, is a reduced version of have and the non-possessive clitic 's of He's working and He's finished it is reduced from is and has respects ively: what is peculiar about possessive ‘sis that it is inherently clitic. The reason for saying that ‘sis a word, not an affix, is that it enters into construction with a phrase, not a stem.* The immediate constituents of the King of Spain's are the King of Spain and 's: clearly Spain's is not a complete unit on its own, so that ‘s cannot be taken as entering into construction with the stem Spain. Semantically ‘sis similar to of; grammatically it differs in that it follows its NP whereas of pre~ cedes (cf. [rhe daughter] of the King of Spain), but is otherwise similar, and we accordingly take it as head of the phrase the King of Spain's just as (the first) of is head of of the King of Spain. Of is a preposition: of the King of Spain is therefore a PP possessive 's by contrast is unique (so that we have not allotted it to any part of speech), and we will accordingly classify she King of Spain's simply as a posses~ sive phrase (PossP). Thus we have the structure: (12) NP Detnr: Head: PossP N — Head the King of Spain 's daughter (The triangle notation used here and in several later diagrams indicates that the Structure of the element in question, here the NP the King of Spain, is left unspeci- fied as it is not relevant to the point being made.) The king's daughter is similar: here the NP complement is simply the king. Where the complement of the possessive element is an NP ending with a regular plural noun such as the kings (and under certain other conditions too ~ ef. Socrates’ death), the possessive clement has no separate phonological expression: ¢f. the kings’ wives; orthographically, however, it is expressed by the apostrophe, * In traditional grammar, however, it is treated as an aflix, king's being then analysed as the pos- Sessive, or ‘genitive’, inflectional form of king.Exercises 35 and we will still analyse the possessive expression as a PossP: it is simply a matter of the possessive element merging phonologically with the last consonant of the NP complement. Not all possessive expressions are PossPs, however. The my of my daughter, for example, differs from the King of Spain's or the king's in two respects. In the first place, it is not found in all the grammatical positions where the latter occur ~ in some we find my, in others mine: the king’s/my/*mine daughter, but This is the king’s/*myjmine. In the second place, my is evidently not phonologically analysable into an ordinary word plus a clitic —compare informal style she man opposite me's facial expression, where possessive 's 18 phonologically attached to me. My is thus a single word; it is not analysable into an NP as complement plus a possessive element as head ~ and hence it is not analysable as a PossP. Rather we will treat my, your, etc., as a subclass of determinatives (possessive determinatives) and similarly mine, yours, etc,, as a subclass of pronouns (possessive pronouns). His, of course, belongs in both sets By virtue of its role as the ultimate head of a clause, the verb is syntactically the most important of the parts of speech, and for this reason we shall be examining it first in the chapters that follow. Ch. 3 deals with the verb itself and Ch. 4 with the kernel constructions of which it is head, while Ch. 5 takes up the categories of tense, aspect and modality, which are primarily associated with the verb, The noun is the next most important part of speech after the verb and accordingly occupies second place (Ch. 6) in the main part of our outline. Its syntactic importance is reflected in the fact that all simple kernel clauses contain at least one noun, just as they contain at least one verb, but need not contain any other part of speech (cf. People laughed, He snores, Kim arrived), moreover, the complexity of phrases headed by nouns approaches that of phrases headed by verbs, while other phrase classes are much simpler. Chs 7 and 8 then deal with the other parts of speech that function as head in phrase structure. Those that do not subordinators and coordinators ~ are left until we come to take up non-kernel constructions: they are discussed in the chapters on subordination (Ch. 11) and coordination (Ch. 13) respectively. EXERCISES 1. Overlap between the parts of speech From each of the following sets of words pick out those belonging to both of the classes specified for the set in question; for those that do belong to both, construct example sen tences illustrating the two uses. (2) Noun and verb: father, mother, son; head, eve, nase, cheek, neck, shoulder, arm, elbow, wrist, hand, palm, finger, thumb; cat, dog, fox, horse; (B) Adjective and verb: big, calm, despise, dry, humble, open, smooth; lower, upper: blue, green, red, yellow, grey, black, white; (7) Adjective and adverb: hard, heary, slow; poor, poorly; good, well, worse; early, late, soon.36 The parts of speech: a preliminary outline II. Closed classes Pick out from the following list those words that belong to a closed class or subclass: you, ewe, lick, tick, in, inn, to, 100, up, pup, ban, can, have, halve, fat, hat, who, do, wheel, will, this, iss, either, neither. III, Heads and dependents The unbracketed phrases in (13) (21) have been divided into their immediate constituents by vertical lines: label them as head or dependent (13) [She was looking for] the | secretary | of the Bushwatking Club (14) The | enemy | commander [had been captured] (15) [A] quite extraordinarily | careless [blunder had gone unnoticed | (16) Something | strange [was happening to me| (17) (He was loath | 10 admit defeat (18) Everyone | who knew her [admired her] (19) (He made] surprisingly | few {mistakes} (20) [We] enjoyed | it (21) [eur it] with | a razor blade IV. Elementary part-of-speech analysis Give a part-of-speech classification of the words in (22) (26), using the eight classes we have distinguished: verb, noun, adjective, adverb, preposition, determinative, coordinator, subordinator. (22) John tried hard but nevertheless couldn't finish it (23) These things always look worse than they really are (24) don't anticipate having any difficulty with the Russian visitors (25) They were very glad that the new version was so much cheaper (26) While he was checking the final proofs he found several verious mistakes V. Possessive expressions Suggest a constituent structure analysis for the phrase a friend of mine's husband.Verbs 1. General definition ‘At the general level, ‘verb’ is applied to a grammatically distinct word class in a language having the following properties: (a) It contains amongst its most central members the morphologically simplest words denoting actions, processes or events; in predications of these types at least, the word functioning as head of the predicate expression will normally belong to the class we call verb. (b) Members of the class carry inflections of tense, language has these as inflectional categories. pect and mood if the Reference to morphological complexity is needed in (a) because we find count- less verb/noun pairs denoting the same action, etc. ~ cf. the earlier example of destroy/destruction: what we are saying in (a) is that with such examples the noun will normally be derived from the verb rather than the other way round, Com- pare also pairs like catchy/catchy, where on semantic grounds we take the verb to be more basic. Many verbs in English and other languages denote states (cf. know, like, etc.) and traditional definitions of the verb generally use some such formula as ‘action or state’; given the concept of general definition that we have introduced, however, it is better to omit states: ‘state’ will figure, rather, in the general definition of adjectives, for with verbs there are more words denoting actions, processes, events than states, whereas with adjectives the situation is very much the reverse. We outlined in 2.4.1 the main distinctive properties of verbs at the English- particular level. The next six sections of this chapter will take up the description of verb inflection in more detail and Ch. 4 will deal with the function and dependents of verbs; it is not necessary to add anything further to what was said concerning the lexical morphology of verbs. 3738 Verbs 2. The inflectional paradigm Most verb lexemes have the six-term inflectional paradigm illustrated in: a) take walk shut Tensed _ Past tense took walked — shut fons 3rd pers sg takes. walks shuts Presemiemse < coreml sake walk shat Base form take walk shut Non-tensed Present participle taking walking shutting forms past participle taken walked — shut The main departures from this pattern are as follows: (a) An important subclass of verbs called operators — be, have, do, can, will, etc. — have negative as well as positive forms in the tensed part of the paradigm. Thus have has hadn't as a negative past tense, hasn't and haven't as negative present tense forms; non-operator take, by contrast, has no negative forms: *rookn’t is ungrammatical and didn’t take is not a single verb, thus not a form of take (see §7 below). (b) A subset of the operators — we will call them the modal operators ~ have only tensed forms and only a single positive present tense form. Will, for example, has just four forms: positive would and negative wouldn't for the past tense, will and won't for the present tense. The central modal operators are can, may, must (which has only present tense forms), will and shall; see §7 below. (©) The verb be has extra person-number contrasts in the past and present tenses. 3. Inflectional morphology (a) Base form. This is in all cases identical to the lexical stem. (b) General present tense form. This is syncretised with the base form; only for be are all the present tense forms distinct from the base. (c) 3rd person singular present. This is normally formed by adding a suffix to the lexical stem. The suffix has three main variants, depending on the phonological Properties of the stem: (2) i If the stem ends in a ‘sibilant’ (/s, 2, J, 3, tf, d3/) it is /iz/ or /oz/ as in kisses, watches, etc. The choice between /1z/ and /oz/ is a matter of the regional or social accent, ii If the lexical stem otherwise ends in a ‘voiceless consonant’ (thus after /p, t, k, f, 6/) itis /s/, as in hops, walks. iii Otherwise itis /z/, as in fobs, runs, sees.4 The inflectional categories 39 ‘There are only four irregularities. For be and have the forms are /tz/ and /haez/ (or reduced versions thereof), while for do and say there is a change in the quality of the vowel (not reflected in the spelling): /daz/ and (for most speakers) /sez/. (d) Past tense form. Regular verbs add to the lexical stem a suffix which again has three main variants, phonologically conditioned: (3) i If the stem ends in an ‘alveolar stop’ (/t/ or /d/); it is /1d/ or /ad/ as in wanted, Janded. The choice between /1d/ and /ad/ depends again on the regional or social accent ii If the stem otherwise ends in a voicele: is /t/, asin pushed, laughed. iii | Otherwise it is /d/, asin killed, died, robbed, onsonant (thus after /p, k, f, 8, 8, J, tf/) it With irregular verbs, the past tense generally involves a change in the stem vowel ~ alone (sang, knew, met, etc.) or accompanied by the suffixation of either /d/ (sold) or more often, and even after voiced consonants, of /t/ (Jost, crept, felt). Other types of irregularity are illustrated in taught, burnt, cut, etc.: there is not space to cover the two hundred or so irregular verbs in detail. (e) Past participle, For regular verbs and the majority of irregular verbs too, the past participle is syncretised with the past tense form. Where it is not syncretised, the past participle generally ends with the suffix /an/ or (less often) /n/, as in taken, broken, forbidden, fallen, grown, drawn, etc. Examples of a distinct past participle form without the /on/ suffix are begun, drunk, swum, etc. (f) Present participle. This is always formed by adding to the lexical stem the suffix /in/ — or its regional/social variants /in/, /ing/. (g) Negative forms. These are normally formed by adding /nt/ to the corresponding positive; when following a consonant, /nt/ constitutes a separate syllable. ‘There are a few irregularities: won't, shan’t, can't, don't (/daont/). 4. The inflectional categories (a) Tense. The primary use of the past and present tenses is to locate in past and present time respectively the state, action, process, or whatever described in the clause: Kim lived in Berlin (past tense, past time) vs Kim lives in Berlin (present tense, present time). The relationship between tense and time is, however, not always so simple, and we will examine the uses of the tenses in more detail in Ch. 5. (b) Person and number. For most verbs, we have noted, there are two present tense forms: 3rd person singular and general (=‘not 3rd per°on singular’). The categories of person and number are primarily nominal rather than verbal: they apply in the first instance to NPs and then derivatively to verbs. In He takes it ser-40 Verbs iously, for example, he is inherently 3rd person singular and takes is derivatively classified as 3rd person singular because it occurs with such a subject. An NP is Ist person if its head is a form of J or we, 2nd person if its head is a form of you, 3rd person otherwise; the contrast between singular NPs like she dog and plural NPs like the dogs needs no commentary at this stage. Most present tense verbs, then, agree with the subject with respect to the combined property ‘3rd person singular’; there is one verb form occurring with a subject having this property and another occurring with a subject not having it. The two departures from this agreement pattern have already been noted: the modal operators do not enter into agreement with the subject and be has more person—number distinctions than other verbs. (c) Polarity. Polarity is the dimension contrasting positive and negative. The system applies not just to the verb but to the clause, and we shall be considering it in that larger context in Ch. 10. At this point we need note only that negative verb forms are usually avoided in formal written style, which prefers analytic nega- tives, marked by the adverb nor ~ thus They are not well rather than inflectional They aren't well. (d) Non-tensed forms. The base form is so called on account of its morphology rather than its characteristic meaning: it is the form that is identical with the lexical stem and hence is the morphologically most basic form. ‘The general term participle applies to a form which has characteristics of both verbs and adjectives ~ itis in ‘part’ like a verb, in part like an adjective. Take sung, for example. In its predicator use, more specifically after perfect have, as in She had sung the aria splendidly, it has much in common with a prototypical verb: it, takes just the same range of dependents as a tensed verb — in this example, an object (the aria) and a manner adjunct (splendidly). In its attributive use, however, as in a splendidly sung aria, it has certain affinities with an adjective, inasmuch as it heads a phrase modifying a noun, a function prototypically filled by an abjective ~ cf. a truly remarkable aria. Whether participles are to be analysed as verbs or adjectives or as a distinct word class altogether will depend on their more specific properties in the particular language under analysis: as far as English is concerned we will include them in the verb class, but will take up the issue further in our discussion of ‘adjectivalisation’ in 7.3 The appropriateness of the term ‘participle’ for the present participle is a good deal more problematic than it is for the past participle, which is the one we have Just used to explain the concept. The present participle does occur in constructions where it has affinities with an adjective, as in a peacefully sleeping child; but it also occurs in constructions where it has affinities with a noun. Thus in Sleeping in so late made me miss the train, for example, sleeping is head of the expression functioning as subject of made me miss the train — and the subject position is prototypically filled by a phrase headed by a noun. There is then another general term, ‘gerund’, which is used for forms sharing the characteristics of verbs and nouns. Ideally we would have a higher order term available, subsuming participle5 The resolution of syncretism 4 and gerund and applicable to forms sharing characteristics of verbs, adjectives and nouns; in the absence of any such term in the standard repertoire, however, I will follow the practice of employing the term ‘participle’ for this form of the verb. The distinction of the participles as ‘past’ and ‘present’ derives from their use in such constructions as Ed has written a novel vs Ed is writing a novel: although the superordinate verbs, perfect have and progressive be, are both in the present tense, in the first we understand the composition of the novel to be in past time whereas the second characteristically locates it in present time. Two points, however, must be emphasised. First, the use of the terms ‘past’ and ‘present’ does not imply a contrast of tense: the participles belong with the non-tensed forms. Second, the past participle occurs not only in the perfect construction just illustrated (Ed has written a novel) but also in the passive construction (The replies are always written by the secretary); the past time component is found only in the former case — but since virtually all verbs occur in the perfect construction while many are excluded from the passive, it is appropriate to base the name on the perfect use. 5. The resolution of syncretism We have seen that there is a good deal of syncretism in the inflectional system of the verb. The two most frequent cases involve on the one hand the past tense and past participle forms, and on the other the general present tense and base forms. How can we ‘resolve’ syncretism? How, for example, can we tell that in (4) rejected is a past tense form in (i), a past participle in (ii)-(iii)? (4) i (They) rejected {it} Past tense ii [They] had rejected {ie iii [Those] rejected [were of little value] } Past participle ‘There is a very simple test that can be applied: replace the lexeme by one which does not exhibit the syncretism concerned, and see which form the construction requires. Suppose we replace reject by take, which has ‘ook as its past tense form and raken as its past participle. Then we can see that construction (i) requires past tense rook (They took/*taken it), while (ii)-(ii) require past participle taken (They had taken|* took it, Those taken{* took were of little value). In applying this test we must bear in mind that verbs may differ in respect of what we shall be calling their ‘complementation’: they may take different types and combinations of ‘complements’. For example, use requires an object, while disappear excludes an object: He used a stick, *He used, He disappeared, *He disappeared a stick. The complements, however, have no effect on the inflectional form (use and disappear, for example, have the same six forms as in the normal paradigm). It follows that, when we substitute one lexeme for another, we can ~ and may have to ~ change the complementation. Thus in He had blamed the misunderstanding on Peter we do not need to search for a verb taking the same complements as blame (an NP as object plus a PP headed by on) but can again_ 42 Verbs show the blamed to be a past participle, as opposed to a past tense form, by sub- stituting take, as in, say, He had taken/*took the misunderstanding lightly. Of course one will quickly be able to dispense with explicitly applying the test, know- ing immediately, for example, that perfect have takes a past participle after it, not ‘4 past tense form — but the rule that perfect have takes a past participle is in effect based on the data deriving from such substitution tests. Consider now the syncretism between the general present tense form and the base form: (5) i [They] open [at 8.30] General present tense ii [They will] open [at 8.30} iii Open [it carefully) i Base form iv [They wouldn't let us} open [it] As we have noted, the only verb whose base form is distinct from all present tense forms is be and this is the lexeme we must therefore use in our substitution test. As its complementation is different from that of open we will need to make adjustments to the material following the verb; (i)-(iv) then correspond respectively to They are at school at 8.30 (with present tense are), They will be at school at 8.30, Be careful with it, and They wouldn't let us be present during the interrogation (with base form be). This result is confirmed by two other more specific tests that we can use to resolve the base vs general present tense syncretism. They derive from the different Positions of the two forms within the classification of the inflectional forms given in paradigm (1). (a) The general present tense form is tensed and as such contrasts with the past tense form, whereas the base form does not enter into contrasts of tense. We note then that (Si) contrasts with They opened at 8.30, whereas there are no corresponding contrasts for (ii}-(iv): *They will opened at 8.30, *Opened it carefully, *They wouldn't let us opened it. (b) The general present tense form likewise contrasts with the 3rd person singular, the choice being determined by agreement with the subject. In the case of (5i), therefore, we find that if we replace shey by a 3rd person singular NP we must change open to opens: He opens/*open at 8.30. In (ii), by contrast, the open remains unchanged, for the base form does not agree with the subject: He will open|*opens at 8.30. Similarly if we replace us by him in (iv): They wouldn't let him open{*opens it. (There is no expressed subject in (Siii), so the test could be applied here only in a much more indirect way, which we need not explore.) * This might occur in certain styles as an elliptical version of / opened it carefully (e.g, in a post- card: Received your parcel. Opened it carefully ...) but that would involve a crucial change in the clause construction, for (Siii) is imperative6 Verb inflection, finiteness and clause subordination 43 6. Verb inflection, finiteness and clause subordination Except in their attributive use, verbs function as the ultimate head of a clause, and the inflectional distinctions found in the verb correlate to a significant extent with syntactic distinctions we need to make between different classes of clause. We need, for example, to distinguish between tensed clauses (¢.g. They are ill), present-participial clauses ({Those] going by bus [should assemble at 6}) and past- participial clauses ((Those] arrested last night {have been released on bail}) clauses whose ultimate head is respectively a tensed form, a present participle form or a past participle form of verb. The base form of verbs is found, however, in a somewhat heterogeneous set of clause constructions; we shall accordingly not have use for a category of ‘base form clauses’, but will work instead with the following more narrowly defined classes: (6) i Be careful Imperative jussive ii [Uris essential] (thar) they be present Non-imperative jussive iii (They want) 10 be with her To-infinitival iv [They may] be right Bare-infinitival As a first approximation (we will look more carefully at jussive clauses in Ch. 9 and at infinitivals in Ch. 11) we can distinguish these as follows. Imperatives — which, as we have noted, are characteristically used to issue requests/commands are virtually always main clauses, whereas the other three classes are virtually always subordinate. Subordinate jussives are distinguished from infinitivals by the actual or potential presence of the subordinator that, and by the fact that a case-variable pronoun in subject function appears in the nominative form ~ thus they in (ii), not accusative them. The two types of infinitival are distinguished by the presence or absence of the special marker so before the verb: fo-infinitivals are thus quite easy to recognise by means of this fo. Although all the clause constructions in (6) contain the same inflectional form of the verb, there are reasons for grouping (i) and (ii) initially with tensed clauses in a class we shall call finite, and putting (iii) and (iv) with participial clauses in a nite class. This gives us the following classification: a Clause class Form of verb Tensed Tensed Finite ail ~ Jussive } ane Infinitival Non-finite < The special properties of jussives are for the most part handled on the clause type dimension. The principal marker of subordination in jussives is that, which is also Participial Participle 2 They are not exhaustive: I omit consideration of the slightly archaic construction involving a base form in conditional and similar clauses ~ if that be so,44 Verbs found in tensed declaratives - compare [/ know] that he leaves this evening (dex clarative) and [/ insist] that he leave this evening (jussive); it is for this reason, pres cisely, that it is useful to recognise a clause class, the one we are calling ‘finite’, which groups the jussives with tensed clauses. It is more usual in languages for the category of finiteness to apply in the first instance to verbs, with a finite clause then being defined derivatively as one containing a finite verb: what has happened in English is that coalescence of formerly distinct inflectional forms into a single base form has yielded a situation where the significant clause classes are not fully definable in terms of verb forms. The meaning of ‘finite’ as a general term in grammar is related to that of ‘finite’ in its everyday sense: “limited, bounded”. Thus a finite verb is one that is ‘limited’ by properties of person, number and tense. In English, as we have seen, the categories of person and number apply to verbs to only a relatively small extent: leaving aside be and the modal operators we simply have a two-way contrast in the present tense, but not the past, between 3rd person singular and general forms. For English, therefore, ‘tensed’ is a more appropriate term than ‘finite’ for the verb-inflection category, and this then leaves ‘finite’ for application to a clause category: since this is the clause class where the verb inflections of person, number and tense are found, the class falls within the scope of a general definition of finite clause. With only a very narrow range of exceptions (such as bare-infinitival Why bother?, etc.), main clauses are all finite: such exceptions apart, therefore, it is in subordination that we have a contrast of finite vs non-finite. Non-finite subordinate clauses differ more sharply in form from kernel clauses than do finite ones. Indeed with the latter, subordination may not be overtly marked at all in the internal form of the clause ~ compare subordinate [He thinks] she likes him, [I know] who broke it with main She likes him (declarative) and Who broke it? (interroga~ tive). Non-finite constructions are thus more peripheral members of the clause category than finites.> Finite subordinate clauses fall into three major classes ~ relative clauses, comparative clauses and content clauses: (8) i [found the book| (that)/which he had recommended Relative [She is more talented than] he is Comparative [They said] (that) you had done it Content We will be examining these categories in some detail in Ch. 11: here we attempt only a rough first approximation. Relative clauses usually function as dependent in NP structure: (i), for example, is dependent to the noun book. The prototypical relative clause differs structurally from a main clause in either of two ways. The type illustrated by which he had recommended has a special relative word — which, who, whom, whose, when, where, why —‘relating to’ the noun head: thus which he had recommended is comparable to the main clause He had recommended the book. The type illus~ trated by (that) he had recommended has an actual or potential that as subordinator and a missing element understood as likewise relating to the noun head: » Some grammars restrict the term ‘clause’ to finite constructions.7 Operators 45 (that) he had recommended the verb recommended has no overt object, but there is one understood, so that the relative clause is again comparable to the main clause He had recommended the book.* ‘Comparative clauses function as complement to than or as, and all are, in varying degrees, elliptical. Thus he is, (ii), is understood as “He is talented (to such- and-such a degree)”. Content clauses constitute the unmarked category among the three classes: they lack the special distinctive properties of relatives and comparatives, and accordingly tend to differ less sharply in structure from main clauses. The main clause counterpart of (iii), for example, is simply You had done it. The system of clause type (Ch. 9) applies to content clauses: (8iii) is declarative, (6ii) above is jussive, [/ wonder] what he wants is interrogative, and [J remember] what a struggle it was is exclamative. 7. Operators ‘There are four non-kernel constructions in English which require the presence of a verb from a small subclass called operators: be, have, can, may, must, will, do, etc. Compare (9) i She isn't[is not the captain ii *She likesn't]likes not the captain } iieamaed yer Dea (10) i Had he read it? eee ee i eRe HE } ‘ensed verb precedes subject (11) i She can swim aS ii *She “knows him | Potasity emphasised (12) i [U'mnot sure he'll go] but he may ii *[We enjoyed it] and Ed enjoyed too } Eoat-yerbal ellipais In each case (ii) is ungrammatical because the verb - like, read, know, enjoy ~ is not an operator. The examples can be corrected by inserting do as a ‘dummy’ operator: She doesn't/does not like the captain, Did he read it?, She “does know him, (We enjoyed it] and Ed did too. Do is a dummy operator in the sense that it is semantically empty, satisfying a purely syntactic requirement. The syntactic rules that derive these four non-kernel constructions from their more basic counterparts (She likes the captain, He read it, She knows him, and Ed enjoyed it too) say that if there is not already an operator present, then do must be inserted. The construction in (9) involves either inflectional or analytic negation of the tensed verb. The tensed verb+subject order illustrated in (10) is found most often in interrogative main clauses, but the inversion takes place under certain other conditions too ~ after an initial negative (Ar no time had he read it/did he read it) or so ({She had read it] and so had he, (She read it] and so did he). (11) involves emphasis that applies to the positive or negative polarity: (i) is understood ‘+ The hat introducing relative clauses is commonly analysed as a relative pronoun like which, who, etc.: under such an analysis, that he had recommended would have that as object.46 Verbs as an emphatic denial of “She can’t swim”, but (ii) cannot be similarly used ay, an emphatic denial of “She doesn’t know him” (though it can be used in other ways ~ of. He "knows her but I'd hardly say he was a friend of hers). Post-verbal elliyygis is ellipsis of material following the verb, immediately or with intervening subject and/or not: in (12i) go is omitted immediately after may, whereas in [She jas resigned) and so have I there is ellipsis of resigned after have plus subject / The rule requiring the presence of an operator in these constructions is Very idiosyncratic to English: closely comparable rules are not found in other languages. For this reason the term ‘operator’ that we have introduced is chosen ad hoc for English: it is not a general term. Its language-particular definition, of course, is that it is the class of verbs allowed in constructions (9)-(12). The operator class contains the following verbs; (a) be (b) have, in certain uses: ‘perfect’ have (see 5.2.3) is always an operator (She hasn't arrived), while the dynamic have of have a dinner/a shower/a swim and the like never is; ‘possessive/obligational” have (replaceable by the idiom have got, Which contains perfect have) can behave either as an operator (Have you any money?, Have we to go?) or a non-operator (Do you have any money?, Do we have to go?) (c) do, in the ‘dummy’ use illustrated above; it is, by contrast, a non-operatoy jn She did her best, They did so, They did something terrible, etc., as is evident from the fact that these require the addition of dummy do in the four operator constructions (She didn't do her best, Did they do so?, etc.) (d) the modal operators: can, may, must, will, shall, should,° ought, need and dare. Besides having the properties common to all operators, these lack non-tensed forms (and indeed all but can, may, will and shall lack past tense forms too), and they show no person-number variation in the present tense. There is also a non- operator need and dare having the normal six-form paradigm — compare oper: tor She needjdare not tell them and non-operator She does not need/dare to tell them. (As operators they take a bare-infinitival complement like all the other modal operators except ought, and they are restricted to interrogative, negative and other ‘non-affirmative contexts’ ~ cf. 10.2.) (e) use in its ‘aspectual’ sense, as in She used to like them; this is a very marginal member, partly because it occurs as an operator only in the first two operator constructions (He usedn't to like them, Used she to like them?), partly because > Some grammars use the term ‘auxiliary’ instead, and this 18 a general term. It is not used here for reasons given in footnote 7 of Ch. 4 ° The status of should as a lexeme is somewhat problematic. The should of examples like / should be very surprised if he won is analysable as a form of shall (compare / shall be very surprised if he wins) but in You should iry harder and the like it is arguable that the connection with shall has been lost and that should ought to be assigned to a distinct lexeme.Exercises 47 even here many speakers treat it as a non-operator (She didn’t use(d) to like them, Did she use(d) to like them?) EXERCISES 1. Paradigms Give the six inflectional forms of the following verb lexemes, following the model for take, etc, set out in (1): drive, find, go, hit, run, sing, want. 11, Syncretism: past tense vs past participle (a) Pick out the verb lexemes in the following list which have syncretism between their past tense and past participle forms: buy, catch, come, do, draw, eat, fall, find, forbid, hang, lose, play, ring, see. (b) Is the unbracketed verb in the following examples a past tense form or a past participle? (13) [He may simply have] made [a mistake] (14) [J és time he] made {his mind up] (15) [Uf you] caught [the earlier plane, you'd have more time] (16) [Uf he] caught [the earlier plane, he should be here by now] (17) [He had been] caught (photocopying a confidential report} (18) [Anyone] caught {trespassing will be severely dealt with) IIL. Syncretism: base form vs general present tense form Is the unbracketed verb in the following examples a base form or a general present tense form? (19) (Don't) make [me laugh] (20) [Uf they] want [it, they can have in} (21) [Jt ix necessary that she] refund {it in full) (22) [I think you) know [what I mean] (23) [They] do {their best] (24) [You can only} do [your best] (2) Do [your best!} (26) [What do you] want [?} IV. Verb inflection: analysis For each verb in the following sentences, say which one of the six major inflectional cate~ gories it belongs to: past tense, 3rd pers sg present tense, general present tense, base form, present participle, past participle (27) Is Kim still working or has she finished? (28) They have been endeavouring (0 contact him (29) Stop pretending you understand it (30) He could not get her to agree, though he tried very hard to do so48 Verbs V. Operators Change the following declaratives into their closed interrogative counterparts and in the light of your answer say whether the first verb of the declarative is an operator. 31) He needn't have gone with them (32) He needs to get his hair cut (33) We ought to notify the landlord (34) We have enough time for one more game (35) He has got a reasonable place to live (36) She had a talk with the director 31) We had better finish it tomorrow4 The structure of kernel clauses A verb, we have seen, functions as head of a VP, which prototypically enters into construction with a subject to form a clause. In this chapter we will deal with these two layers of structure: the VP and the clause. As both are headed, immediately or ultimately, by the verb, it is convenient to take the two together — and for plicity we will subsume both under the heading of clause structure; indeed, as we shall see towards the end of the chapter, it is arguable that we need more than two layers of structure with the verb as ultimate head. We will confine our attention, apart from the occasional 1. Subject and predicate The first division we make in the analysis of kernel clauses, then, is into subject and predicate. Thus in an elementary example like (1) Your father washed the car again your father functions as the subject of the clause and washed the car again as the predicate. We will initially consider the subject function at the language-particular level: its general definition will be discussed in §4, along with that of the object and predicative. In English the subject is distinguished grammatically from other func- by a whole cluster of properties, most notably the following: tions in the cla (a) Form class. The prototypical subject is an NP: there is no predicate that cannot take an NP as subject. In kernel clauses virtually the only other form of subject we find is a subordinate clause, such as that he was guilty in That he was guilty was now clear to everyone. Thus in (1), the only candidates, as it were, for subject function are the NPS your father and the car: this first property excludes the verb washed and the AdvP again. (b) Position in declarative clauses. In declarative clauses the normal position for the subject is before the verb ~ immediately as in (1), or with an intervening 4950 The structure of kernel clauses AdvP, as in Your father very often loses his temper (where the AdvP very oftert comes between the subject your father and the verb /oses). Only in certain thematically marked non-kernel clauses is this order departed from. Thus in (1) your father and the car are most easily distinguished as subject and object respectively by virtue of their linear position. (c) Position in interrogative clauses. In main clauses containing an operator (cf. 3.7) the simplest kind of interrogative clause is derived from its declarative counterpart by moving the operator to the left of the subject. Thus declarative Your father is washing the car again yields interrogative Is your father washing the car again?, If the declarative’s verb is not an operator, then the interrogative is formed by introducing dummy do in that position: the interrogative of (1) is Did your father wash the car again?. In either case the subject ends up following the tensed verb, so that your father is immediately identifiable as subject by its position after tensed is and did. But we can also use the present criterion indirectly for the declaratives: your father is seen to be subject of the two declaratives precisely because it is the element whose position relative to the tensed verb is changed when the interrogative is formed." (d) Subject-verb agreement. Person-number properties of the verb are determined by agreement with the subject. In Your father likes it, for example, likes agrees with 3rd person singular your father: if the latter is replaced by your Parents, then likes must also be replaced by like. Modal operators and past tenses of verbs other than be have no person-number properties, but we can apply the agreement criterion indirectly in such cases by changing the verb and/or the tense. Thus in Tom wouldn't help me there is no agreement, but if we replace past modal wouldn't by present non-modal doesn't we can see that it is Tom that selects doesn’t in contrast to don’t. Similarly, with Your father knew them: if we replace knew by a present tense, it is easy to see that the 3rd person singular form knows is required, so as to agree with your father. (e) Case in personal pronouns. A handful of pronouns, we have noted, have contrasting case forms: nominative I, he, she, we, they vs accusative me, him, her, us, them. In finite clauses the subject requires a nominative form, while the object takes an accusative. Thus in They shot him we have nominative they as subject, accusative him as object. (The ‘predicative’ ~ see §4 below ~ allows either nominative or accusative, according to style: compare formal Jt was J with informal Ir was me.) In analysing a clause where the NPs do not carry any case inflection we can again usually apply the case criterion indirectly by making appropriate sub- ' Note that there is no comparable interrogative for That he was guilty was now clear to everyone: * Was that he was guilty now clear to everyone, We can of course have Was it now clear 10 everyone that he was guilty?, this, however, is the interrogative of the extrapositioned counterpart It was now clear to everyone that he was guilty. Subordinate clauses cannot in general follow the tensed verb in interrogative or analogous structures: this is one reason for saying that they make less prototypical subjects than NPs.1 Subject and predicate 51 stitutions: in (1), for example, your father is replaceable by nominative he, while the car is replaceable by accusative them (1) Conditions on omissibility. In kernel clauses the subject is an obligatory element, along with the predicator: the minimal kernel construction consists of j these two elements, as in Everyone laughed. One respect in which a clause may be non-kernel is by virtue of being elliptical, and a number of elliptical constructions specifically involve the subject. One is the imperative, where a second person subject is omissible: (You) be quiet!. Others are subordinate non-finites, such as the infinitival [Ed remembered) to take his key (compare the finite main clause Ed took his key) or present-participial [Liz married Ed before] hearing of this incident (compare Liz heard of this incident). Notice that these particular non-finite constructions require a double reference to the subject: firstly, the subordinate clause lacks a subject, and secondly, the missing subject is recoverable from the superordinate clause subject (so that, we understand “Liz married Ed before she heard of the incident”, not“... before he heard of the incident”). In kernel clauses the subject is very easily identifiable by the criteria we have given. Some non-kernel clauses, as just noted, lack a subject, but for the rest, most of the processes deriving non-kernel clauses leave the subject intact. For example, if we coordinate, subordinate or negate (1) the subject will remain your father (cf. [Tom mowed the lawn] and your father washed the car again, [He says] that your father washed the car again, Your father didn't wash the car again). There are, however, some processes which change the subject — notably some of those yielding thematically marked clauses. Thus when we change active (1) into its passive counterpart The car was washed again by your father the original object the car takes over the subject function — as can be verified by applying criteria (b)-(£). In examining the thematic processes in Ch. 12, we will take up the question of which ones are like passivisation in effecting such a reassignment of the subject function. The predicate we can deal with very quickly. At the language-particular level it is in fact most easily defined negatively by reference to the subject: as a first approximation, the predicate is what is left of the clause when we remove the subject (together with any coordinator and/or subordinator introducing the clause) For example, in / realise that he is ill the predicate of the superordinate clause is realise that he is ill (what is left after the removal of the subject /), while that of the subordinate clause is is il/ (what is left after the removal of the subject he and the subordinator thar). Asa general term, predicate applies to the function of a constituent, prototypically having a main verb as its ultimate head, that enters into construction with the subject and characteristically serves semantically to ascribe to the person or thing referred to by the subject some property or a role in some relation, action, event, etc. In John is tall, for example, the predicate is tall ascribes the property of tallness to John, in Your father washed the car the predicate washed the car52 The structure of kernel clauses ascribes to your father the role of actor with respect to the action of washing. the car, and so on. 2. Predicator, complements and adjuncts The predicate position is filled by a verb phrase. Leaving aside cases of ellipsis, @ VP contains a verb as head optionally accompanied by one or more dependents. A more specific term for the head of a VP in predicate function is predicator- Thus in (1), for example, washed is predicator, washed the car again predicate; in Kim washed, just as Kim is both a noun and an NP, washed is both a verb and a VP, hence both predicator and predicate. The dependents of the predicator within the VP are of two main kinds, complements and adjuncts, Illustrating again from example (1), the car is a complement (more specifically an object), while again is an adjunct. Complement is a function that we shall be using in the analysis of other constructions than the VP (for example, we analyse the dependent following a preposition as its complement, and indeed we shall take the subject in clause structure to be a complement of the predicate), but it will be convenient to explain it initially with reference to VP structure ~ which is where it has its application in traditional grammar. Comple- ‘ments are distinguished from adjuncts in VP structure, then, by the following Properties: (a) Non-omissibility. Complements are sometimes obligatory, whereas adjuncts are always omissible. Thus if a dependent of the verb is obligatory it will be a complement, if it is omissible its status will have to be determined by other criteria. In He became ill or He used a drill the dependents ill and a drill are both obligatory and hence complements. By ‘obligatory’ we mean that dropping the clement yields either ungrammaticality, as in these examples, or else a significant change in the meaning of the verb, as in Kim fell ill, where dropping ill leads to a clear change in the meaning of fell. (b) Verb lexeme classification. The selection of a complement of a particular type depends on the presence of a verb lexeme of an appropriate class, whereas the selection of adjuncts is not lexically controlled in this way. Take example (1) once more. There are lots of verbs which exclude the selection of a dependent with the function of the car: * Your father hoped/disappeared|relied the car and thus the car, although it is not obligatory, is identifiable as a complement. Again, by contrast, can occur with any verb and is accordingly an adjunct. (c) Form class. The most central complements are NPs or AdjPs, while the most central adjuncts are AdvPs. All the examples given have followed this pattern, but the form class criterion is very much subsidiary to the others, so that in the case of conflict priority will be given to criteria (a) and (b). To a very large extent, however, the correlation does hold. The main exception involves temporal NPs like this morning, last week, etc., which, although they can function as comple-3 Objects and predicatives 53 ment (as in [wasted this morning), more often function as adjunct (as in J arrived this morning). All three properties are relevant at both the general and language-particular levels. The etymology of the term ‘complement’ relates to the first property Verbs like become and use are traditionally said to be ‘verbs of incomplete predi- cation’ ~ i.e. they cannot form a predicate by themselves: they require a dependent element to ‘complete’ the meaning or, in other words, to ‘complement’ them: In many languages there is a closer match between complements and obligatori- ness than there is in English, where property (b) provides the main distinguishing criterion. It does not yield an absolutely sharp boundary between complements and adjuncts, but again we will follow our policy of concentrating on the clear cases. 3. Objects and predicatives The two most central types of complement are objects and predicatives. We will see in due course that they can occur together, but initially we will confine our attention to clauses containing a single complement of one or other of these two types — more specifically a ‘direct’ object (O") or a ‘subjective’ predicative (PC the ‘C’ distinguishes PC, a complement, from P, the predicator). Prototypical examples are given in (2) i Her son shot the intruder S P 04 ii Her son was brilliantja genius. S$ PPC ‘The construction in (i) is called ‘transitive’, that in (ii) ‘copulative’ — and these terms likewise apply to the verbs appearing in the two constructions, so that shoot in (i) is a transitive verb, be in (ii) a copulative verb. At the language-particular level, direct object and subjective predicative are distinguished grammatically in English by the following properties (a) Form class. While both PC* and O* positions can be filled by an NP. only a PC* can be filled by an AdjP. In (ii), for example, we have either an AdjP (brilliant) or an NP (a genius), whereas in (i) only an NP is possible. With some verbs the PC must be adjectival: He went mad/*a lunatic. Note similarly that with get an adjectival complement will be predicative (e.g. He got angry’), with get meaning “become”, while a nominal one will be an object (e.g. He gor a good seat), with get meaning “obtain” (b) Passivisation. Transitive clauses can normally undergo the thematic process of passivisation, with the object of the active becoming the subject of the passive, whereas copulative clauses can never be passivised. Thus (i) can be transformed to The intruder was shot by her son, with the intruder now subject, but performing the corresponding operation on (ii) yields the completely ungrammatical *Bril- liant/A genius was been by her son.54 The structure of kernel clauses (c) Number. With an NP object, number is selected quite independently of the subject, so that in the transitive construction we usually have all four combinations of singular and plural NPs: Sg+Sg in (2i), Sg+PI in Her son shot the intruders, Pl+Sg in Her sons shot the intruder, P1+P\ in Her sons shot the intruders, Here we have a semantically significant contrast between a singular object and a plural object, just as we do between a singular subject and a plural subject. With an NP predicative, however, number is normally not semantically contrastive in this way. In the simplest cases, the predicative agrees in number with the subject: Her son was a genius/*geniuses but Her sons were geniuses/*a genius, But very often the predicative is non-contrastively singular: Kim and Ed had both been a strange colour|a pain in the neck/ President of the Union. The most distinctive semantic role of NPs, the one most characteristically associated with subject and object function, is to refer and it is in this role that number is typically found to be contrastive. The predicative role is shared with AdjPs, to which the category of number does not apply, and it is accordingly not surprising that number in predicative NPs should be less significant than in referential ones. The only construction of any generality where we find a plural PC with a singular subject is illustrated in The only solution is more frequent patrols. This belongs to what we will call the ‘identifying’ be construction, where the complement differs significantly from a prototypical predicative; apart from its independently selected and contrastive number, it has the property that it can be switched to subject function (cf. More frequent patrols are the only solution), a property bearing some resemblance to the potential of an object to be switched to subject function by means of passivisation: see 12.3 (d) Pronominal case. A case-variable pronoun in object function takes accusative form, whereas one in PC* function takes nominative or accusative depending on style (as we noted above in discussing the case of the subject): Ed saw me/*/ but The only one they didn't notice was Ijme. The J of the latter belongs to relatively formal style. Personal pronouns, however, are far from prototypical predicatives (semantically they are chiefly used to refer, not to predicate), and they do not occur with all copulative verbs (cf. * The victim seemed he/him): they are virtually restricted to the identifying be construction mentioned in (c) above.? 4. Subject, object and predicative as general terms At the general level the subjective predicative may be defined as a grammatically distinct function usually filled by an AdjP or an NP, prototypically in construc- * There is a good deal of variation in terminology with respect to what I am in this book calling ‘predicative’ (and have elsewhere called, more fully, “predicative complement’). Some grammars do not employ ‘complement’ in the broad sense adopted here but restrict it to the predicative: a subjective predicative is then called a ‘subject complement’ and an objective predicative (to be introduced in §5 below) an ‘object complement’. The contrast between object and predicative is sometimes made in terms of ‘extensive’ complement vs ‘intensive’ complement. A further term quite widely used is ‘predicate nominal’: this applies to predicatives in the form of an NP.4 Subject, object and predicative as general terms 55 tion with the verb “be” and characteristically denoting some property that is pre- dicated of the person(s) or thing(s) referred to by the subject. By “be” I mean be or its equivalent in other languages. In prototypical examples like (2ii), however, be can hardly be said to have any independent meaning: it serves syntactically to carry the tense inflection that is required in kernel clauses. The main semantic content of the predicate lies in the complement — hence the term ‘predicative’ complement. The be thus serves as what is called a copula, i.e. a ‘link’ between the complement and the subject ~ which again is why the term copulative is applied to the construction, and by extension to other verbs that are syntactically substi- tutable for be, such as appear, become, get, remain, seem, etc., in some of their uses. Semantically the subject and the direct object, unlike the predicative, prototypically refer to persons or things involved in the situation described in the clause to ‘participants’ in the situation. Thus (2i), for example, describes a situation involving two participants, her son and the intruder. In (2ii), by contrast, there is only one, her son: brilliant/a genius does not refer to a second participant but gives a property of the sole participant in the situation Normally the participants in a two-participant situation have different semantic ‘roles’. In (2i) her son has the role of ‘actor’, the performer of the action, while the intruder has the role of ‘patient’, the undergoer of the action. What the roles are will depend on the type of process: Her son knew the intruder, for example, does not describe an action (to know someone is not to perform an action) and hence it would be inappropriate here to speak of her son as the actor and the intruder as the patient. Nevertheless we will take action clauses as a starting- point for an explication of subject and object at the general level, for actor and patient are clear, salient and sharply differentiated roles in a large range of examples. We will apply the labels ‘NP,’ and ‘NPy’ to the two NPs in a kernel action clause which refer to the actor and patient respectively. Thus in (2i) her son is NP, and the intruder NP», (The restriction to kernel clauses serves to exclude passives, such as The intruder was shot by her son.) In a one-participant situation the issue of differentiating roles does not arise, and we will apply the label ‘NPs’ (mnemonic for ‘single participant) to the NP in a kernel clause describing such a situation — most straightforwardly in clauses consisting of just an NP and a verb, such as Her son fainted. In English NPs behaves grammatically like NP,: both have the language- particular properties of the subject set out in §1 above, Not all languages are like this, however, for it is also possible for NPs to be grouped grammatically with NP». The general term subject is applicable only in languages (the majority) where there is significant syntactic resemblance between NP, and NPs: its definition is that it is a grammatically distinct function subsuming NP, and NPs.* A further semantic property of the subject in many languages is that it is the element correlating most closely with the “topic” of the clause, i.e. with the per * The literature on subject and object as general categories uses A, P (or ©) and $ instead of NP,, NPp and NPs respectively.56 The structure of kernel clauses son(s) or thing(s) that the message expressed in the clause is primarily about Leaving aside examples like As for Tom, he was too ill 10 join us or As regards health insurance, they're proposing to retain the present scheme, where as for and as regards serve to encode the topic status of Tom and health insurance, the grammar of the English clause does not explicitly mark one element as identity- ing the topic, and this inevitably makes the category of topic a somewhat elusive one — more so, for example, than that of actor. What the topic is (if indeed there is one) normally has to be inferred from the larger context. For example, an utterance of a clause like He shot her, with he referring, let us say, to Ed and her to Li could be construed as being primarily about Ed (e.g. in response to What did Ed do?) or as being primarily about Liz (c.g. in response to What happened to Liz?). Nevertheless we can say that, other things being equal, the subject is the element that is most likely to identify the topic. Compare, for example. active Kim struck Pat across the face (with Kim as subject) and passive Par was struck across the face by Kim (with Pat as subject). The two clauses describe the same event ~ and the most likely reason for selecting the non-kernel passive rather than the kernel active would be to present the message as being primarily about Pat rather than Kim. This broad correlation with topic constitutes a significant general property of the subject, but it will be clear that the correlation is not remotely close enough to provide an identifying criterion at the language-particular level for English. For it is easy to find examples where it would be quite implausible to claim that the subject picked out the topic: Nothing will satisfy you (with nothing as subject) would characteristically be used to say something about you, There's a fallacy in that argument (with there as subject: see 12.5) to say something about that argument, and so on 5. The complex-transitive and ditransitive constructions This section introduces two constructions containing not just a single complement like those in §3, but two. A complex-transitive clause contains both an object and a predicative: (3) Everyone considered Pat an imposter SPO" PC® The relation between an imposter and Pat here matches that holding between them in the copulative (single-complement) construction Pat was an imposter; in the latter Par is subject and an imposter subjective predicative, in (3) Par is object and we therefore analyse an imposter as objective predicative (PC*). Thus the relation between PC° and O* in the complex-transitive construction is the same as that between PC* and $ in the copulative construction, and an objective predicative is definable derivatively as like a subjective one except that it relates to the object rather than the subject. Consider it then with respect to properties (a)-(c) of §3 (we need not take up (d) because personal pronouns do not occur in PC* function, which reinforces the point that they do not make prototypical predicatives).5 Complex-transitive, ditransitive constructions s7 (a) Form class. An objective predicative can be an AdjP or an NP: an imposter in (3), for example, is replaceable by the AdjP dishonest. (b) Agreement. The number of an NP in PC° function is again prototypically determined by agreement ~ this time with the object. Note then that in (3) singular an imposter matches singular Par, and if we replace Pat by them then we will need a corresponding change in PC*: Everyone considered them imposters (c) Passivisation, An NP in PC? function cannot become subject through passivisation: the only passive counterpart of (3) is Par was considered an imposter by everyone (with the object Pat becoming subject), not *An imposter was considered Pat by everyone. A second double-complement construction is the ditransitive clause, containing two objects: (4) The woman gave Kim the money § PO! OF (For the clause containing just one object we will use the term monotransitive; ‘transitive’, as introduced earlier, applies to a clause containing at least one object.) The first object in (4), Kim, is the indirect object (O'), while the second, the money, is the direct object. We have already dealt with the latter, so it remains just to examine the general and language-particular properties of the indirect object At the general level it is definable as a grammatically distinct function usually filled by an NP and characteristically referring, in a kernel clause describing an action, to the ‘recipient’ ~ recipient, that is, of what is referred to by the direct object. (As usual with semantic correlations, we need the qualification ‘characteristically’: Kim is the recipient of the money in (4) but in He forgave Kim her indiscretion she did not receive the indiscretion, and in They charged Kim $10 she did not receive the $10 — quite the reverse.) It will be noted that ‘recipient’ is explained by reference to the direct object and this reflects the fact that in kernel clauses an indirect object normally occurs only if there is also a direct object: if there is just one object it will normally be direct. Subject, direct object and indirect object are similar functions in that they characteristically refer to what we have called a ‘participant’ in the situation, the semantic differences having to do primarily with the role of that participant. The grouping together of the direct object and indirect object as different kinds of object in contrast to the subject re~ flects the fact that the subject is often set apart semantically by its special association with the topic and syntactically by the constituent structure, where (in quite a number of languages, including English) the clause is first divided into subject and predicate, with direct and indirect objects then both being functions within the predicate. Typically there are also more specific syntactic resemblances between the two kinds of object; in English, for example, both require accusative case for case-variable pronouns (though languages with richer case systems than nglish will usually have different cases for them), the indirect object is like the58 The structure of kernel clauses direct in its ability to become subject through passivisation (compare (4) with Kim was given the money by the woman) and whereas all kernel clauses must con. tain a subject, they do not all contain an object. The terms ‘direct’ and ‘indireey* are based on the idea that the referent of the direct object is characteristically more directly involved in the action than that of the indirect object ~ in (4), for example, it is the money that the woman most immediately acts upon: she takes jt and passes it then to Kim. Turning now to the language-particular level, the indirect object in English has the following properties: (a) Position relative to direct object. In kernel clauses O! normally occurs with following 0%, as in (4). Hardly any verbs allow an O! as sole object and we do not find the order S-P-O%-O' so that the indirect object is prototypically identifi. able as the first of two NP objects. Consider, for example, the ditransitive clause He sent them some flowers. We can drop the O' them without changing the fun. tion of some flowers: it remains O4 in He sent some flowers. But in He sent ther the syntactic and semantic role of them is different: them is O" and refers not to the recipient but to the patient (more specifically the entity that is caused to go, somewhere). Thus send, like many other verbs, can occur with O'+O% or O« alone, but not with O! alone. (b) Association with prepositional construction. Very often a ditransitive clause is paraphrasable by one containing the preposition 10 or for: (3) i Tom lent Kim the binoculars ii Tom lene the binoculars to Kim (6) i Tom bought Kim some binoculars ii Tom bought some binoculars for Kim [Lis thus characteristic of the indirect object to correspond to the complement of to or for in pairs of this kind. Notice, however, that although the most frequent ditransitive verbs also enter into the corresponding prepositional construction, there are quite a few others that do not ~ allow/permit, refuse; bet/wager; bid, charge, fine, begrudge/envy; forgive|pardon, hit|strike; reach; shout (as in shout someone a drink); spare; and so on (thus He allowed/refused me a second go, but not *He allowed/refused a second go tolfor me). Conversely there are verbs entering into the prepositional construction but not the ditransitive — cf. He said some terrible things to her vs *He said her some terrible things (contrast tell). It is doubtful whether the correspondence is systematic enough to justify deriving one construction from the other, and I shall accordingly treat both as kernel. Only the (i) example in pairs (5) and (6) contains an indirect object. In (sii), for example, the NP Kim is not a complement of the verb lent but of the preposition fo ~ and although 10 Kim is a complement of the verb, it is not an object by virtue of being * Some dialects do allow this order when O* is a personal pronoun: I'll give it you, You must give them Dr Smith,6 Five major patterns of complementation 59 a PP rather than an NP: notice that one clear respect in which PP complements differ from objects is that they can never become subject through passivisation (cf. *To Kim was lent the binoculars by Tom).5 (c) Resistance to fronting. The indirect object cannot, or cannot readily, be moved to the front of the clause by the rules which reorder the elements of structure in various non-kernel constructions. Compare kernel (Si) and (6i) with (2) *Who(m) did Tom lend the binoculars? Closed interrogative (8) *[the one] whom Tom hought some binoculars Relative Instead of (7) we could of course say Who(m) did Tom lend the binoculars to? or To whom did Tom lend the binoculars? these, however, are based not on the ditransitive construction of (5i) but on the prepositional (Sii), where neither the NP Kim nor the PP fo Kim is an indirect object. The fact that either the PP whole or the NP within it can be fronted is indeed a major reason for distingu ing them syntactically from the indirect object in spite of the equivalence of semantic role. 6. Five major patterns of complementation We have now introduced two constructions containing a single complement, O* or PC®, and two with a pair of complements, O4+ PC? and O' +0". Adding the construction where there is no complement at all gives us the five patterns of verb complementation shown in (9). (9) Structure Name Example 1 Soe: Intransitive Kim arrived S Pp Pct Copulative Kim became illfa teacher i) <3. POF Monotransitive Kim saw the accident IVS _P Of PC* Complex-transitive Kim considered him foolish/a fool vi S P Of O* _ Ditransitive Kir told him the truth Specification of the syntactic properties of a given verb (such as, ideally, one would expect to find in a comprehensive lexicon matching up with the grammar) will say, among other things, which of these constructions, and others that we have not yet introduced, it can enter into ~ it is of course for this reason that the post-verbal elements are complements, not adjuncts. For example, remain appears in 1 (Many problems remain) or II (He remained conscious/an agnostic), drink in | (Pat drank), IM (Pat drank beer), 1V (Pat drank himself unconscious) oF V (They drank us a toast); use only in II (It uses @ lot of fuel), get in I (Tom's condition got worse), II (He got a surprise), IV (They got him drunk) or V (They got me a drink). The names given in (9) apply to the clause construction and to the 5 In traditional grammar the Kim (or (0 Kim) of (Sii) is analysed as an indirect object, just like the Kim of (i) ~ and analogously for other pairs; the position taken in this book, however, is that the similarity between the Kim: of (ii) and that of (j) is a matter of semantic role rather than syntactic function.60 The structure of kernel clauses corresponding (use of the) verb; thus Kim considered him foolish is a complex- transitive clause and consider, as used here, is a complex-transitive verb. The indirect object is in general an optional element: all verbs that can enter into construction V can also enter into HI (though not vice versa, of course).* The great majority of monotransitive verbs also belong to the intransitive class; here, however, we find two main kinds of relation between constructions IIT and I, as exemplified in (10)-(11): WW I (10) ear She ate anapple She ate (11) stop She stopped the car The car stopped In the first kind, the participant role of the subject-referent remains constant and the intransitive clause simply leaves unexpressed the second participant: She ate entails that she ate something but doesn’t specify what. In the second kind the subject of the intransitive corresponds to the object, not the subject, of the transitive; both clauses in (10) describe a situation in which the car changed from 4 state of motion to one of rest. Some of the verbs that are found with this second kind of relation normally occur in the intransitive construction only in combination with a manner adverb, a negative or the like. With iron, for example, we will not find *The shirt ironed (matching transitive He ironed the shirt), whereas This shirt irons well is perfectly natural. ‘A somewhat higher proportion of predicatives are obligatory than is the case for objects — but we still find examples of both II and IV where the predicative is omissible, Compare, for die, I] He died a pauper and I He died and, for paint, 1V She painted the fence blue and UI She painted the fence. Note, by contrast, that the predicative is not omissible, in the sense we have given to that term, in examples like She went mad or She found him intolerable, for dropping mad and intolerable results in a significant change in the meaning of the verb. This is evident from the fact that while He died a pauper and She painted the fence blue entail He died and She painted the fence, respectively, She went mad and She found ‘him intolerable do not entail She went and She found him. This concludes our survey of the most central and straightforward complements within the VP: objects with the form of NPs and predicatives with the form of AdjPs or NPs. In the next section we will introduce, more briefly, a range of constructions that depart in various ways from these central patterns. 7. Other types of complement (a) Place, direction and time complements (12) i [My driving licence is] in the car Place ° This is not to say that O' can be freely dropped from all clauses containing it ~ only that all ditransitive verbs also have monotransitive uses. Give, for example, is used monotransitivel Tom gave $5 (with the recipient not expressed but recoverable from the context), but the O' could hardly be dropped from a clause like I must give the door another coat of paint.7 Other types of complement 61 ii [Ed went) into the garage Direction iii [The meeting is] at 5 o'clock Time Place and direction both have to do with space: the difference is that place is static, while direction involves movement (and various subtypes of direction could be distinguished according as the movement is basically to(wards), from or via). We will see that place and time expressions can also function as adjuncts; in (12), however, in the car and at 5 o'clock qualily as complements because they are not omissible. The directional PP into rhe garage in (ii) is omissible, but its occurrence is dependent on the presence of an appropriate verb, such as go in this example. The most frequent form for the three types of complement is a PP, as in (12); they can, however, also take the form of AdvPs (Ed is here: The meeting is afterwards) or, to a very limited extent, NPs (Ed is/ The meeting is this evening). went upstairs: went next door: (b) Complements of prepositional verbs. A considerable number of verbs take PP complements where the preposition is fully determined by the verb itself and thus does not have any identifiable independent meaning of its own (such as can be ascribed to the prepositions in (12) (13) i Many people referred to her article ii They charged him with perjury Whereas the 0 of, say, the complement of direction in He walked to the cemetery is replaceable by from, within, towards, etc., that in (13i) is not. Lexically it belongs with refer: the entry in the lexicon for refer must specify that it takes @ complement headed by ro. Syntactically, however, it belongs with her article, for to her article forms a constituent; this is evident from the fact that 49 can accompany its NP complement to the front of the cltuse in such constructions as the relative [the article] 10 which many people referred. Verbs that enter into the construction of (13) are called prepositional verbs (though there is no standard term for the PP complement itself). There are a great many such verbs ~ compare intransitive apply for, approve of, attend 10, decide on. transitive accuse ... of, confine ... (0, interest ... in, protect ... from, and so on. They include verbs such as lend ... 10, buy ... for which can also occur in the ditransitive construction: see (5) and (6). A number allow more than one preposition but still without any independent meaning assignable to it. Thus the difference in meaning between call for [an inquiry] and call on (a friend is not derivable from the meanings of the prepositions, but will still have to be dealt with in the lexical entry for call. Similarly, the entry for blame will specify that the preposition can be for, as in He blamed Kim for the accident, or on, as in He blamed the accident on Kim, depending on which semantic role is associated with the direct object and which with the complement of the preposition. In the examples considered so far the complement of the preposition has some affinities with an object ~ it might be regarded as an ‘oblique object’, i.e, one which is not related to the verb immediately but via a preposition. And in the construction where there is no object proper ~ i.e. in (13i) as opposed to (ii) ~ the62 The structure of kernel clauses oblique object can often become subject through passivisation: Her article way referred to by many people. There are also a few prepositional verbs, however, where the complement of the preposition is an ‘oblique predicative’: That county as wrongia hit, They took him for deadja foreigner; compare also pass for, de. seribe|recognise|regard .... as, and so on (c) ‘Particles’ as complement (14) i Kimcame to ii He turned the light off The complements so and off here are ‘particles’. These are traditionally regardeq as a subclass of adverbs, but they lie very much at the periphery of the advert class (see 8.1); most words that are used as particles also have uses as prototypica] Prepositions (cf. He went to London, He fell off the roof). Particles may combing with other types of complement ~ with an object in (ii), a predicative in Jt turneeg out greenja great success, a PP complement of a prepositional verb, as in They are looking forward to their holiday (where forward is a particle, to their holiday a PP), and so on. The particles given above are parts of the idioms come 10, turn off, turn out, look forward to: these will have to be listed in the lexicon, for the meanings are hot systematically derivable from the meanings of the separate words. It is q characteristic of English that it contains an enormous number of verb + particle idioms (and also verb + preposition idioms of the type dealt with in (b) above), Particles, however, are not restricted to idioms: most of them can function also as complements of direction (or, less often, place), as in Ed jumped off, He brought the clothes in, etc. Indeed, there is no sharp dividing line between idiomatic and literal uses of the particles. When the particle combines with an object, it is generally possible to reverse the order of the two complements. Thus (14ii), for example, has He turned off the light as a thematically marked variant. Note that this construction is to be dis. tinguished from that containing a single complement with the form of a PP, Compare, then: (15) i (He turned) off the light Particle ++ NP ii [He nurned] off the main road PP. ‘There are several clear syntactic differences between them: (a) In (i) the two com. plements can occur in either order as we have noted, but in (ii) there is only one complement and hence no possibility of reordering ~ ef. *He turned the main road off: (B) Where the NP object is an unstressed personal pronoun it cannot follow a Particle: He turned it off but not *He turned off it (it="the light”); an unstressed Personal pronoun can of course function as complement of a preposition, so an alternative to (Si) is He turned off it (it=“the main road”). (y) A particle can never be fronted along with a following object (since they do not form a single constituent), whereas a preposition can be fronted along with its complement: compare *[the light] off which he turned and [the road] off which he turned.7 Other types of complement 63 (d) Finite clause complements (16) i Fknew that he was ill S P Of ii The problem is that we can't really affordit, SP PC Subordinate clause complements exhibit varying degrees of functional resemblance to NP complements, but finite ones are sufficiently similar for us to be able to assign them the same functions ~ direct object in (i), predicative in (ii). A direct object with the form of a finite subordinate clause can combine with other complements — with an indirect object (her) in You told her that it was genuine, with a particle (out) in She made out that she knew him, and so on. When it combines with PC° in the complex-transitive construction, extraposition is virtually always obligatory; thus instead of *He considers that Liz got the job monstrously unfair we have non-kernel He considers it monstrously unfair that Liz got the job ~ see 12.4, (e) Non-finite complements. All four kinds of non-finite distinguished in 3.6 are found as complement to a verb: 7) s P Non-finite Comp i [She wants} to leave the country To-infinitival ii [She must), leave the country Bare-infinitival iti [She kept] leaving the country Present-participial iv [She has) left the country Past-participial The majority of non-finites contain no subject — and often there is no syntactic possibility of inserting one, which makes them somewhat peripheral to the clause category. Some non-finites can, like finites, be assigned the same functions as NPs. This applies to the copulative construction (with be in its identifying sense): The only solution is to resign, The first mistake was inviting the boss. And also to the complex-transitive construction, where extraposition applies with infinitivals (thus This made it a waste of time to accompany them rather than *This made to accompany them a waste of time), but not with present-participials (She considered attempting it a waste of time). For the rest, however, non-finites bear too tenuous ‘a functional resemblance to NP or AdjP complements to warrant analysis as objects or predicatives: it is better to treat them as a special kind of complement. ‘There is again no standard term available, but the verbs that take such complements are widely called catenatives, and this term we will adopt. Thus want, must, keep and have as used in (17) are catenative verbs. The term is derived from ‘con- catenation’, which means “chaining together”. The construction 1s ‘recursive’, in that one non-finite can occur as complement within another, so that we may end up with a chain of catenative verbs, each followed by its non-finite complement. In She wants to try to persuade them to stop drinking so much, for example, the verbs want, try, persuade and stop are catenatives; drinking so much is the complement of stop, to stop drinking so much is one of the complements of persuade, and so on. Such complements may occur alone, as in (17), or in combination with64 The structure of kernel clauses other complements ~ a prepositional complement (upon him) in She prevailed upon hint to change his mind, an object (him) in She persuaded him to change his mind, @ particle complement (up) in He ended up changing his mind, and so on.” It will be evident from the summary survey given in this section that there ig g very considerable range of verb complementation patterns; the five with estap- lished names, set out in (9) above, are merely a selection from the most elementary and frequent patterns. 8. Adjuncts Grammars of English (and of languages generally) usually recognise numeroys different kinds of adjunct. The following examples are illustrative of the catego, ies to be found, but the list is not intended to be exhaustive (18) Kind of adjunct i [She spoke] very slowly Manner {Feur id} with the bread-knife Instrument [She travelled] with her father Comitative (We arrive there] at midnight Time v (He slept} for twelve hours Duration [She gets it right] more often than not Frequency [He left carly) so as not to miss her Purpose [went home] because Thad no money left Reason ix [liked it) enormously Degree x Ur bounces) if you drop it Condition xi [twas a dead loss,] from my point of view Viewpoint [He took the early train) perhaps Modal [He liked her,] nevertheless Connective The labels are for the most part self-explanatory: only a few need commenting on. Comitative adjuncts indicate accompaniment ~ they are prototypically introduced by wish. Modal adjuncts express various kinds of modality — they have the same kind of meaning as modal operators (see 5.3). Connective adjuncts serve to connect the clause to what has gone before, and constitute one of the devices by which a text is distinguishable by its ‘cohesion’ from a random sequence of sentences, * Many grammars analyse some of the verbs here treated as catenatives as auxiliary verbs; most commonly analysed in this way are the ones belonging to the operator class, such as must and have in (17), At the general level, auxiliary verb may be defined as applying to a syntactically distinct verb class whose members have the following properties: (a) They express meanings or mark grammatical categories of the kind that are often expressed /marked by inflections ~ e.g, tense, mood, aspect, voice. (/3) They function as dependent to the verb they enter into construction with. Analysing must in (17ii) as an auxiliary, for example, would imply that it is dependent and feave head: must leave would then be a constituent (belonging {0 a class intermediate in the hierarchical structure between verb and VP). There has been a good deal of debate on the issue of whether a well-motivated distinction can be drawn in English between auxiliaries and catenatives; the view taken here is that it cannot, and that we have no class satisfying the general definition of auxiliary verb.9 Constituent structure 65 Adjuncts usually have the form of AdvPs, PPs or subordinate clauses but, as noted above, certain kinds (c.g. adjuncts of time) can also take the form of NPs Thus in We arrive there this evening the NP this evening has the same function as the PP at midnight in (18iv). Adjuncts are less tightly integrated into the structure of the clause than are complements: their occurrence is less governed by grammatical rule. They are always optional and their selection does not depend on the presence of a verb of a particular subclass (these are the criteria we used to distinguish them from complements); nor can we give grammatical rules excluding particular combinations of different kinds of adjunct or imposing a maximum number of adjuncts for any clause: restrictions of these kinds will depend on considerations of style, compre~ hensibility and semantic coherence. And indeed the distinction between the kinds of adjunct illustrated in (18) is to a significant extent semantic rather than strictly syntactic. All this is not to suggest that the grammar will have nothing to say about adjuncts: there are grammatical rules concerning some aspects of their position in the linear order of the clause and of their internal form (e.g. the properties of subordinate clause adjune The boundary between adjuncis and complements is by no means sharply drawn: the manner and instrument categories, for example, lie in the rather fuzzy borderline area. And there are some subcategories, such as place and time as mentioned earlier, that apply to both complements and adjuncts. Thus in The meeting was this morning the time element this morning isa complement (by virtue of its non-omissibility), whereas in Ed was absolutely furious this morning it is an adjunct. 9. Constituent structure So far we have been working with two layers of structure above the verb: the VP and the clause. Within the clause, we take the VP to be head (predicate). There are two reasons for this. In the first place, the form of the VP plays a major role in determining properties of the clause as a whole: kernel clauses, for example, require a VP with a tensed verb; present- and past-participial clauses, which occupy a distinctive range of positions in larger constructions, are so classified by virtue of the form of their verb: and ¢o-infinitivals are likewise marked as such in the structure of the VP. Secondly, the possibility of having a clause rather than an NP as subject depends on the lexical selection made in the VP, usuallly in the verb. Thus just as there are verbs such as believe, know, regret, which allow a clause as object (/ believe that Kim was guilty), so there are verbs such as annoy, dismay, surprise, which allow a clause as subject (That Kim was guilty surprised us all). V say that it is ‘usually’ a matter of verb selection because in the copulative construction it depends rather on the predicative (compare That Kinr was guilty was obvious/*weak)," but in either case choice of a clausal subject depends on the © This indicates that the predicator + predicative construction is far from a prototypical instance of the head + dependent construction.66 The structure of kernel clauses presence of an appropriate lexical item within the VP, the head clement. As a de. pendent, the subject belongs to the complement category: in tensed clauses it ig obligatory and, as we have just seen, the type of subject allowed depends on lexi. cal selection within the head. Subject and object are thus both complements, but at different levels in the constituent hierarchy. One major reason for recognising the VP as a constituent (instead of analysing a clause like / know him immediately into subject + predicator + object) is that there are various processes that apply to reduce it by ellipsis, or substitution. Thus in [She can speak Dutch but] I can't the predicate is reduceq by ellipsis to can't (= “can’t speak Dutch”) and in [They told him to take a rope but I don't know] whether he did so, it is reduced by substitution to did so (= “took a rope”, or “did take a rope”): the short forms take the place of a fuller predicate, A second point is that there are various non-finite constructions where no subject is allowed: [She began] to like him, [The money] belonging to the victim [was never returned], and so on. Such factors lend support, therefore, to the traditional analysis whereby a (kernel) clause is first divided into a subject and a predicate. We have been more or less tacitly assuming up to this point that adjuncts belong within the predicate — so that the immediate constituents of, say, / saw her yesterday will be I+ saw her yesterday. But such an analysis is surely not plausible for all adjuncts: it is, for example, very counterintuitive to say that the immediate constituents of J saw her, however are 1+ saw her, however, One would want, rather, to divide it into / saw her + however, with however entering into construction with / saw her as a whole. Within the very broad category of adjuncts we will therefore draw a distinction (though again with some fuzziness at the boundary) between modifiers and peripheral dependents, Modifiers differ from peripheral dependents in that they share with the most central kinds of complement (including the subject) the ability to be brought into contrastive focus by various means, such as the cleft construction, ~ compare (19) Thematically unmarked Cleft i Lizwrote it vy It was Liz who wrote it ii She wrote the foreword vi_It was the foreword that she wrote iii She wrote it in France vii [twas in France that she wrote it iv She wrote it, however vili "Zr was however that she wrote it Thus we can focus the su bject Liz, the object the foreword, the modifier in France, but not the peripheral dependent however. Just as some categories apply to both complements and adjuncts, so do some apply to both modifiers and peripheral dependents. Thus in He had gone home early because he felt unwell (interpreted a giving the reason for his going home early) the reason adjunct is a modifier, but in He had gone home early, because his light was off (interpreted as giving the reason why I infer that he had gone home early) it is a peripheral dependent. The first can be cleft (/t was because he felt unwell that he had gone home early) but the second cannot, under the interpretation given. Modifiers we will assign to the predicate constituent, the VP, whereas peri-Exercises 67 pheral dependents will be introduced at a higher level in the hierarchy. Thus simplified structures for (1 9iii) and (iv) are as follows: (20) i ii ‘Clause, ee S:NP Predicate: VP Clause AdvP os ae oa S P:V O:NP_ = Mod:PP S:NP Predicate: VP_ \ PV O:NP she wrote it in France she wrote it ‘however We accordingly allow one clause to function as head within a larger clause ~ and it will then just be ‘minimal clauses’ (those which do not have a smaller clause as head) that have a subject + predicate structure. EXERCISES 1. The subject in non-kernel clauses Give the unmarked counterpart of each of the following and then determine whether or not the syntactic process deriving the non-kernel construction changes the subject. The unmarked counterpart is in all of these examples a kernel clause, so that its subject will be easily identifiable by reference to the subject properties given in this chapter; use these same properties to identify the subject of the non-kernel clause and hence to determine whether or not it is the same as that of the corresponding kernel clause. In (21), for example, the unmarked counterpart is declarative Kim wrote the letter herself, where Kim is subject: Kim is also subject of (21) and hence the process forming closed interrogatives is not one that changes the subject (though it does change its position) (21) Did Kim write the letter herself? Closed interrogative (22) [The man] who came to dinmer [stole the silver] Subordinate: relative (23) [The cup] that he gave me [was cracked) Subordinate: relative (24) The minister was driven to the station by Liz Passive (voice) (25) Iisa mystery why she puts up with him Extrapositioned (26) There was only one student present Existential construction (27) Some of them it completely destroyed Marked by thematic fronting (Answers for (24)-(27) can be checked against the discussion of thematic systems in Ch. 12) II, Objects and predicatives Is the unbracketed expression in the following examples an object or a predicative? (28) [That sounds] a great idea 29) [The guard sounded) the alarm68 The structure of kernel clauses (30) [The inspector looked] them [up on his return} (31) [They took] decent enough people (32) [She made] a firsterate treasurer (33) [She taught] herself [Greek] IIL, The ditransitive and complex-transitive constructions They made him a colonel and He called her a nurse are both ambiguous, being analysable as either ditransitive or complex-transitive clauses. Explain the ambiguity, specifying which meaning correlates with which syntactic structure IV. Verb complementation For each of the following verbs, say which of the five patterns of complementation set out in §6 (intransitive, copulative, monotransitive, complex-transitive and ditransitive) it can enter into: ask, buy. call, elect, find, give, grow, make, run, smile, wish, Provide illustrative examples consisting of kernel clauses with no adjunets. V. Particles and prepositions Is the unbracketed word in the following examples a particle (forming a complement of the verb on its own) or « preposition (head of a PP in which the following NP is complement)? (34) [She looked] up [ull the references} (35) [He ruled| out {any compromise] (36) [21 depends] on [the time of day] (37) [I didn't take) in (ohe significance af what had happened] (38) [They came] across [the meadow] (39) [Ther came] across [a few problems] VI. Clause analysis The following kernel clauses are analysed into their constituents: identify the function of cach, selecting from the set S, P, PC’, PC*, O*, OY, *C* (any other complement), “A* (adjunct (40) Tom submits \ his tax-rerurn | on time | every year (41) Kim's remark | made | Max \ extremely unhappy (42) Everyone | seemed | extraordinarily self-confident | at the time (43) She | remained | an agnostic ‘all her life (44) They | live | very comfortably (on the income from their shares (45) He found) it easy (46) He | found it easily (41) They | ordered | all of us | out of the room (48) He persuaded them of his innocence (49) We | sold | then | most of the furniture (50) She put up | with his drunkenness \ for fifteen years5 Tense, aspect and modality This chapter will be primarily concerned with the semantics of the tense inflections and of certain aspectual and modal catenatives; in addition we will consider, in the light of this semantic discussion and of what has already been said about the grammar, the nature of tense, aspect and mood/modality as general linguistic categories. 1. Tense We begin with the inflectional category of tense, examining in turn the various uses of the present and past tenses in English. 1.1 Present tense The following uses of the present tense may be distinguished: (a) Present time situations (1) i Kimlives in Berlin Kim plays defensively forward iii Kim washes her hair with Zoom shampoo The primary use of the present tense is to locate the situation in present ume ~ where ‘situation’ is to be understood as a general term covering states, actions, processes or whatever is described in the clause, and present time is the time of the utterance. Situations can be classified as either static (states of affairs, relations, etc.) or dynamic (actions, processes, events, etc.). Static situations will be understood to extend beyond the moment of utterance: Kim’s living in Berlin, for example, has much’ greater duration than an utterance of (1i). Dynamic situations are by contrast understood to be effectively simultaneous with the utterance: (ii), for example, might be used in a running commentary on a cricket match, Notice, however, that (ii) can be interpreted in two ways: as involving either a single instance of playing forward or else repeated, habitual instances 6970 Tense, aspect and modality (e.g. in response to What do they do when they get a good length ball?). In the single instance interpretation we have a dynamic situation, whereas repeatedly playing defensively forward is to be understood as a static situation, a state of affairs characterised by the repeated or habitual behaviour — and again this state of affairs extends beyond the time of utterance, just like the more obviously static situation in (i). Much the more salient interpretation of (iii) is of this habitual kind: a situation where Kim habitually washes her hair with Zoom shampoo and hence one extending beyond the time of utterance. The dynamic, single event reading is less salient because of the difficulty of seeing such an event as virtually simultaneous with the utterance. (It is not altogether excluded, however, and one could perhaps imagine the sentence being so used in a demonstration on a TV commercial for Zoom shampoo.) Thus the use of the present tense for dynamic situations is fairly restricted: it is found mainly in running commentaries, demon- strations (e.g. J add a pinch of salt in a cookery demonstration) and for certain kinds of act performed precisely by virtue of uttering a sentence that describes the act (1 promise to be back before six). (b) Present time schedules of future situations (2) The match starts tomorrow Here we have dynamic situations which are in future time, not present time, There is nevertheless a present time element in the meaning, in that we are concerned with what is presently arranged or ‘scheduled’ (1 use the term in an extended sense, to cover natural events, as in The sun sets at 6.40 tonight). This is why (2) is much more likely than, say, Tom has a heart attack tomorrow: we don’t So readily envisage a heart attack being arranged in advance. (c) Futurity in subordinate clauses (3) [ULwant to finish before] John gets up In certain types of subordinate clause we find a present tense verb for a future situation. This use of the present tense occurs most often after such temporal expressions as after, before, until, and conditional expressions like if, unless, provided. It is thus a non-kernel use: the temporal interpretation of John gets up in (3) is different from the one it has when it stands alone as a sentence, These temporal and conditional prepositions do not always induce a future interpretation: it depends on the larger context; compare (3), for example, with / always leave before John gets up 1.2 Past tense The past tense has the following uses: (a) Past time situations (4) i Kim lived in Berlin1 Tense aT ii Kim played defensively forward iii Kim washed her hair with Zoom shampoo These are the past tense counterparts of (1) and the past tense serves straightforwardly to locate the situation in past time. Static situations may again extend beyond the time at which they are said to obtain, so that it does not necessarily follow from (4i) that Kim no longer lives in Berlin. Dynamic situations will be wholly in the past — but the past can accommodate longer situations than the present, so that for (4iii), in contrast to (iii), the single hair wash (dynamic) interpretation is at least as salient as the habitual reading (static). (b) Past time schedule of future situations. The past tense counterpart of (2) is The match started tomorrow. There is no change in the time of the starting: what has changed is the time at which the arrangement/schedule is said to hold. Thus a context might be: Ar that stage the match started tomorrow, but yesterday they decided to postpone it till next week. This use of the past tense is vastly less frequent than the corresponding use of the present tense. The match starts on Tuesday does not allow an interpretation where the event is simultaneous with the time of utterance and hence is readily available for the scheduled future use; The match started on Tuesday, by contrast, easily sustains the single event in the past reading: for the past schedule meaning one would therefore generally choose a more explicit means of expression, such as The match was going/due/scheduled to start on Tuesday. (c) Factual remoteness. Compare now (5) i If Ed came tomorrow, we could play bridge ii Ifher parents were still alive, they would be over eighty (6) i If Ed comes tomorrow, we can play bridge ii Uf her parents are still alive, they will be over eighty ‘The subordinate clauses in (6) have present tense verbs; in (i) the time is future, in (ii) present. In (5) we have past tense verbs but the times of Ed’s coming and her parents” being alive are still future and present respectively. The tense difference thus signals a difference not in time, but in the speaker’s assessment of the likeli- hood of the condition’s being fulfilled: the past tense presents it as a relatively remote possibility, the present tense as an open possibility. ((Sii) would most often be used when her parents were known or assumed not to be still alive, but it is not restricted to such contexts.) (5) and (6) contrast as unreal vs real conditional constructions. An unreal conditional has a past tense in the subordinate clause with this factual remoteness meaning and a modal operator (also in the past tense if it has one) in the main clause. A past tense in the subordinate clause of a real condition, by contrast, will serve to locate the state or event in past time in the usual way: If Ed was at yesterday's meeting, he will have seen her. The factual remoteness meaning of the past tense is not restricted to unreal conditional constructions. It is also found in subordinate clauses after wish or ifR Tense, aspect and modality be time (I wish{I1 is time they were here). In main clauses it occurs only with moday operators. The difference between He'll be about seventy now and He'd be aboty, seventy now, for example, as responses to How old do you think he is?, is that te latter is less assured, more ‘hedged’, than the former. (d) Backshifting. Suppose Ed on some occasion utters the sentence Jill has three children: | can subsequently report this event in a variety of ways, including (2) i Ed said that Jill had three children Backshifted ii Ed said that Jill has three children Non-backshifted These illustrate what is known as indirect reported speech, indirect in that one purports to give only the content expressed, not the actual words used (contrayy the direct reported speech in Ed said: ‘Jill has three children’), In (i) we have a past tense (had) instead of the original present tense (has): this shift from present tense to past tense is known as backshifting, In (ii), by contrast, there is no backshifting. The difference is then that in (i) the state of Jill's having three children is temporally related to a point in the past, the time of Ed’s utter. ance, whereas in (ii) it is temporally related to a point in the present, the time of my (the reporter's) utterance. The backshifted construction is the more neutral Or faithful report, for in Ed’s original utterance he was clearly locating Jill's having three children in relation to the time of his own utterance, not my report of it. In using the non-backshifted construction I imply that the change of reference point makes no difference to the validity or significance of what was said: if it was known, for example, that between the time of Ed’s utterance and the time of my report Jill or one of her children had died, then it would be out of place for me to use (ii). Similarly, if Ed’s utterance has been / have to leave in a couple of minutes then unless my report were given immediately I'd have to use backshifting: Bg said that he had to leave in a couple of minutes. The term ‘indirect reported speech’ is actually too narrow, for backshifting occurs equally in the report of feelings, beliefs, knowledge, etc. It applies, We should also note, to all three of the uses of the present tense outlined above ~ cf. 7 thought Kim lived in Berlin, He didn’t know the match started tomorrow, He wanted to finish before John got up; in the latter John’s getting up is future relative to the time in the past associated with the wanting. Backshifting can be triggered, moreover, by a superordinate past tense expressing factual remoteness: /f [ thought it was possible (I'd give it a try]. Backshifting represents a non-kernel use of the past tense. Notice, for example, that in / knew you'd understand, the clause you'd understand is interpreted quite differently than when it occurs on its own as a sentence. 1.3 Tense as a general term It will be evident from what has been said that we must distinguish clearly between the grammatical category of TENsE and the semantic category of TIME and the fairly complex relation between them again shows the importance of dis-2 Aspect B tinguishing between language-particular and general definitions. It would clearly be wrong-headed to define the past and present tenses in English as forms used to express past and present time respectively: at the language-particular level they are defined by their place in the verbal paradigm. These forms are then labelled with the general terms past and present tense on the basis of their primary use. We will say that a language has tense if it has a set of systematically contrasting verb inflections (or comparable analytically differentiated classes), where the primary semantic function of the terms is to relate the time of the situation to the time of utterance. Tense thus involves the grammaticalisation of time relations, in the sense of ‘grammaticalisation’ explained in 1.1 ~ it is a grammatical category with time relations as its semantic basis. 2. Aspect 2. Aspect as a general term It is unfortunate that the terminological distinction between tense and time has no well-established analogue in the domain of aspect: the one term ‘aspect’ is widely used both for a grammatical category of the verb and for the type of meaning characteristically expressed by that category. To avoid possible confu- sion I will not henceforth use the term on its own, but will speak instead of ‘grammatical aspect’ on the one hand and ‘semantic aspect’ or ‘aspectual meaning’ on the other, There are quite a number of items in English that express aspectual meanings. The majority are catenative verbs: begin (He began looking|to look for it), com- mence, start, cease, finish, stop (She stopped talking to me); continue, keep (They kept interrupting him), be (She was resting); use (1 used to like it: it occurs with the relevant sense only in the past tense); have (You have read it), and so on. We should also mention the adjective about (The plane is about to land) and a few idioms: carry on, keep on, be going (It's going to rain), on the point of, and so on. Aspectual meaning involves not the temporal location of the situation, but rather its temporal flow or segmentation. With begin and stop, for example, we focus on the initial and final segments; with keep the situation is presented as ongoing, usually with repetition (They kept interrupting him implies repeated interrup- tions); with abour and be going (whose meanings fall towards the boundary between the aspectual and temporal location categories) the situation is in pro- spect; and so on. Strictly speaking, English does not have grammatical aspect. We will say that a language has grammatical aspect if it has a system of the verb, marked inflectionally or by such analytic devices as auxiliaries, where the primary semantic contrast between the terms is a matter of aspectual meaning. English clearly does not have aspectual inflections and the expressions with aspectual meaning illustrated in the last paragraph are not auxiliary verbs. We can talk of aspectual verbs, i.e. verbs with aspectual meaning, but they do not form a grammatically distinct class and are not dependents of the verbs with which they enter into construction.74 Tense, aspect and modality As far as English is concerned, then, aspectual meanings are lexicalised (expressed by various lexical items) rather than grammaticalised (expressed by grammatically distinctive dependents or inflections) ~ and this is reflected in the fact that there are a comparatively large number of aspectual verbs and other expressions.! There is not space here for a comprehensive treatment of these aspectual expressions: instead we will focus on the two most frequent (and difficult) ones, ‘progressive’ be and ‘perfect’ have. 2.2 Progressive be In its aspectual use, catenative be takes a present-participial complement, such as writing a letter in She is writing a letter. We will investigate its meaning by examining the contrast between the progressive construction, marked by be + following present participle, and its non-progressive counterpart ~ for example (8) i Mrwasraining Progressive ii It rained Non-progressive (ii) is the non-progressive counterpart of (i) in that they differ only with respect to the presence or absence of be + present participle inflection: the inflectional property carried by be in (i) ~ in this case, past tense ~ is carried by rain in (ii). For pur- Poses of comparison | will use the term ‘situation’ in such a way as to exclude the be itself, so that in (8) we are in both examples concerned with the situation of its raining: the difference between (i) and (ii) is then a matter of the semantic aspect in which the situation is presented Progressive be is so called because its basic meaning is that it presents the situa~ tion as being ‘in progress’. This implies that it is conceived of as taking place, thus as having a more or less dynamic character, rather than being wholly static. The situation is viewed not in its temporal totality, but at some point or period within it. The non-progressive can be used for both static and dynamic situations; in the latter case the situation is, by contrast, presented in its totality. (ii) above provides an elementary example of the contrast. Rain denotes a dynamic situation and (ii) accordingly presents it in its totality, as an event; (i), on the other hand, presents it as in progress at some intermediate point or period (as in It was raining when I woke up). Certain more specific contrasts of meaning arise through the interaction of the above basic meaning and the meaning of the following verb and its complements. Consider, for example, progressive Kim was opening the parcel vs non-progressive Kim opened the parcel. Whereas (8i) entails (ii), there is no such entailment here. Some expressions, such as open the parcel as opposed to rain, can be used for situations involving some inherent completion point: there is a point at which the opening of a parcel is complete and you cannot go on opening it beyond that 1 As noted in 4.7, many grammars analyse the operators (other than be and have in their non. catenative uses) as auxiliary verbs: in such an analysis English will have aspect as a gramm: cal category.2 Aspect 15 point — whereas there is no point beyond which it cannot go on raining. Where the situation has such an inherent completion point, the progressive indicates, then, that it is presented not just as being in progress but as being incomplete. A different type of special case is illustrated in Kim is living in Berlin vs Kim lives in Berlin. The progressive here suggests a situation of limited duration, something relatively temporary. Unlike rain or open the parcel, live in Berlin denotes a basically static situation and would thus most neutrally occur in the non- progressive. Use of the progressive requires a dynamic interpretation and this is achieved by viewing the situation as impermanent, as progressing towards its end Our discussion of tense in §1 above focused on the non-progressive. We noted that (in the non-progressive) the present tense is less readily used for dynamic situations located in present time than the past tense is for such situations located in past time: with the present tense the dynamic situation has to be short enough to be effectively simultaneous with the utterance. In the progressive, however, there is no such limitation on the use of the present tense: we are here concerned not with the totality of the situation but with some intermediate point or period and it is simply this intermediate point or period that has to be simultaneous with the time of utterance. Thus progressive (9) Kimis washing her hair with Zoom shampoo lends itself much more easily than (liii) above to an interpretation involving a single act of hair-washing rather than repeated acts. It will nevertheless be clear from what has been said that it would be a mistake to analyse the semantic difference between progressive and non-progressive as, say, “single occurrence” vs “habitual”, Both (9) and (iii) allow either single occurrence or habitual read- ings: this is not a distinction that is expressed by the presence or absence of be. For (lili) we suggested that the single occurrence reading might occur in a commercial demonstration; for (9) the habitual reading would carry an implication of temporariness ~ Kim might be temporarily using Zoom while her regular shampoo is unobtainable for one reason or another Where present or past schedules of subsequent events are involved, as in Kini is leaving for Sydney tomorrow vs Kim leaves for Sydney tomorrow, the difference in meaning is rather elusive and hardly predictable from the basic meaning of progressive be given above; the progressive here seems to allow for a greater element of intention or choice on Kim’s part. Finally we should note that certain verbs denoting clearly static situations are virtually excluded from heading the complement of progressive be: belong, consist, contain (as in contain two pints as opposed to contain the enemy), possess, etc. Thus while /t belongs to me is perfectly natural, [1 is belonging to me is not, and so on, 2.3 Perfect have The verb Aave enters into a variety of catenative constructions: She had written the report, She had to write the report, She had her son write the report, She had her16 Tense, aspect and modality son writing the report, She had the report written by her son. We shall be concerned here with just the first of these ~ that where it has a single complement with the form of a (subjectless) past-participial clause. We will refer to this as the perfect construction, contrasting it with its non-perfect counterpart, differing from it by the absence of have and the associated past participle inflection. Thus the non- perfect counterparts of She had written the report (with past tense have) and She has written the report (present tense) are respectively She wrote the report and She writes the report. Again we will apply the term ‘situation’ to what is left of the meaning when we abstract away the have and the tense ~ so that the situation in all four of these examples is that of her writing the report We need to distinguish two cases of the perfect construction: the ‘present perfect’, where have carries a present tense inflection (has gone, [They] have gone, etc.) and the ‘non-present perfect’, where have either carries the past tense inflection or else is non-tensed (had gone, to have gone, may have gone, having gone, etc.). (a) The present perfect. Like the past tense (in its primary use), the present perfect locates the situation in past time ~ compare (10) i Kim is itt Present non-perfect ii Kim was ill Past non-perfect iii Kimhas been ill Present perfect The difference is that the past non-perfect involves a point or period in the past that is exclusive of the present, whereas the present perfect involves a period that is inclusive of the present as well as the past. This is why certain types of temporal expression cannot occur with one or other of them. Yesterday, last week, three weeks ago and the like indicate times that are entirely in the past and are hence incompatible with the present perfect: we can have / arrived here last week but not *T have arrived here last week. Conversely, at present, as yet, so far, since last week occur with the present perfect but not the past non-perfect: At present I have written four chapters, not *At present I wrote four chapters. Because the present perfect involves a past inclusive of the present it is well suited to situations beginning in the past and lasting through to the present: Kirt has lived in Sydney since 1975. Here the situation of Kim’s living in Sydney covers the period from 1975 to the present. But it is not of course restricted to such cases, for the present time may be involved in other ways. In / have lost my key, for example, the losing took place in the past but the sentence would typically be used when I still don’t know where the key is and where the significance of the past event is for the present state of affairs resulting from it. An example like The New Zealand dollar has been devalued by 20% might be used in a news bulletin: the present perfect is often used for past events related to the present by their recency and current news value. With Have you read ‘Middlemarch’? | would typically be concerned not with some specific occasion (contrast Did you read ‘Middlemarch'?) but simply with whether the event has taken place at any time in the period extending up to the present. In all these examples, the choice of a time2 Aspect 1 period inclusive of the present implies that the situation has some kind of relevance to the present ~ that it has what is commonly called ‘current relevance’. (b) The non-present perfect. Here the distinction between an inclusive and an exclusive past is ‘neutralised’ ~ i.e. the non-present perfect can be used for either. Let us consider first the case where have is non-tensed ~ for example, a base form following a modal operator: (11) i Kim may have been here yesterday ii Kimr may have been here since yesterday (i) corresponds to Maybe Kim was here yesterday, with past non-perfect was necessitated by yesterday, while (ii) corresponds to Maybe Kim has been here since yesterday, with since yesterday indicating a period beginning in the past and stretching through to the present and thus requiring the present perfect has been. The contrast between was and has been is lost in have been. Or take, secondly, the case where have carries the past tense inflection: (12) i He had written only one paragraph the previous day ii He had written only one paragraph so far Here we have a double dose of pastness, one expressed by the past tense inflec~ tion, one by catenative have: the writing is not simply past in relation to the time of utterance, it is past in relation to some contextually given time that is itself past in relation to the time of utterance. Suppose, for example, we have a context where we have been talking about last Tuesday: the writing is then past relative to last Tuesday. In (i) the more distant past is exclusive of the less distant one: Mon- day is exclusive of Tuesday. In (ii) we have a period beginning in the past relative to last Tuesday but stretching through to include it: the issue is how much he had written in the period up to and including last Tuesday. If the immediate reference point were not last Tuesday but the time of utterance, we would have respectively He wrote only one paragraph yesterday and He has written only one paragraph so far: again the contrast between past non-perfect and present perfect is lost when the reference point is moved into the past. The general term ‘perfect’ is an aspectual label — and like ‘aspect’ itself is commonly applied to both a grammatical category and a type of aspectual meaning. Perfect aspectual meaning involves a situation resulting from the completion of an earlier situation, and perfect grammatical category applies to one with this as its characteristic meaning. Completeness is closely related to pastness and hence perfect aspect is semantically similar to past tense: the difference is that with perfect aspect the emphasis is on the current or resultant state, while with past tense it is on the past situation itself. The meaning of the English have + past participle construction is not a prototypical instance of perfect aspectual meaning, but in case (a) ~ where have is in the present tense ~ we do find that the past situation is presented as crucially connected with the present: it is for this reason that we apply the term ‘perfect’ in English. It should also be added that perfectB Tense, aspect and modality have is among the two or three catenative verbs that come closest to qualifying ay auxiliaries (in the sense explained in Ch. 4, fn. 7). One final point we should make about perfect have is that it cannot head the complement of various other aspectual verbs, such as begin, stop, progressive be, etc. Thus we cannot reverse the direction of dependency in has begun/stopped) been reading the report to give *He began|stopped|was having read the report 3. Modality 3.1 The modal operators What we are calling the ‘modal’ operators ~ can, may, must, will, etc. ~ are used to convey a considerable range and variety of meanings; in the space available here we can do no more than illustrate some of the main types, but this will suffice to Provide a basis for our discussion in the next subsection of the general semantic category of modality and the associated grammatical category of mood. We will group the uses under three headings: (a) Epistemic uses (13) i He may be ill ii He must be a friend of hers iii He will have finished by now The non-modal counterparts are respectively He is ill, He is a friend of hers, He has finished by now. If | use the modal versions rather than the latter, the reason would typically be that I do not have the (immediate) knowledge that would justify my asserting the non-modal ones. ‘Epistemic’ derives from the Greek word meaning “knowledge”: these uses are thus called epistemic because they involve implications concerning the speaker’s knowledge of the situation in question. In (i) I don’t know that he’s ill but there is a possibility that he is; in (ii) his being a friend of hers is not something I have stored in my mind as a piece of knowledge but something I present as a necessary conclusion from what I do have more direct knowledge of; in (iii) I am not able to assert from direct observation that he has finished but I predict that when we are in a position to know one way or the other it will be confirmed that he has (b) Deontic uses (14) i You can/may have another apple ii He must be in bed before 8 o'clock iii You shall have your money back ‘Deontic’ derives from the Greek for “binding”: in these uses we are concerned with obligation, prohibition, permission and the like. Thus (i) would most typically be used to give you permission to have another apple and (ii) to impose an obligation on him to be in bed before 8 o’clock (or on someone else to ensure that3 Modality 9 he is), while with (iii) 1 would in effect bind myself, put myself under an obligation, to see that you have your money back. (c) Subject-oriented uses (15) i Liz can run faster than her brother ii Liz wouldn't lend me the money |so I borrowed it from Ed) These are ‘subject-oriented’ in that they involve some property, disposition or the like on the part of whoever or whatever is referred to by the subject: in (i) we are concerned with Liz’s physical capabilities, in (ii) with her willingness: Lots of sentences, taken out of context, allow more than one interpretation. He must be very tactful, for instance, can be interpreted epistemically, “I conclude that he is very tactful”, or deontically, “It is necessary that he be very tactful” The examples given in (13)-(15), moreover, are intended as prototypical illustra- tions of the three categories of use: not all examples fall so easily into one or other of the categories, They will nevertheless serve to give some idea of the meanings conveyed by the modal operators. 3.2 Modality and mood Just as we distinguish between TENSE, a category of grammatical form, and TIME, a category of meaning, so it is important to distinguish grammatical Moop from semantic MODALITY. The area of meaning termed modality contrasts with the meaning involved in an assured factual assertion. Of the uses outlined in the last subsection the epistemic and deontic are those that fall within this area ~ we accordingly speak of epistemic modality and deontic modality, To return to the earlier examples, the non-modal He is ill, He is a friend of hers, He has finished by now would characte lly be used to make assured factual assertions, whereas (13i-iii) all involve some qualification; the qualification is of course much greater in (i) than in the others, but (ii) and (iii) are still clearly less assured than their non-modal counterparts. Similarly we may compare (14i-iii) with You have an apple there, He is in bed now, You have your money back now: these again would characteristically be used for assured factual assertions, whereas (14i-iii) would typically be used for permitting, directing, undertaking rather than for asserting facts. Cutting across the dimension contrasting epistemic modality and deontic modality (and various other types too) is another dimension where we contrast the modality of possibility, as in (13i), (14i), the modality of necessity, (13ii), (14ii), and so on. Modality is expressed by a variety of linguistic devices, lexical, grammatical and prosodic. There are a considerable number of lexical items with modal meanings. They include most of the operator ay, must, can, will, shall, should, ought, need, and also be and have in some of their uses, as in You are to be back by six, If they were to try again [they would be in trouble}, You'll have to work harder. There are also non-operator catenatives with modal uses: allow, permit, oblige, ete. (cf. You aren't allowed to do that) ~ and need and have have modal meanings whether80 Tense, aspect and modality they behave as operators or not. In addition we find modal adjectives, such as possible, likely, probable, certain, sure, necessary, and modal adverbs, such as perhaps, maybe, possibly and other derivatives from the adjectives. Turning to ‘grammar, the interrogative and imperative constructions have modal meanings - assured factual assertions are normally in declarative form. And the use of the past tense for factual remoteness, as in (5) above, clearly involves modal meaning. Prosodic expression of modality is illustrated, for example, in rising intonation overlaid on a declarative: with such intonation, He is ill, say, will be interpreted as a question rather than an assured factual assertion. Mood involves the grammaticalisation of modality. More specifically, mood applies to a system of the verb, marked inflectionally or analytically (by auxiliaries, say), where just one term, the most elementary, is characteristically used in making assured factual assertions, while the other terms, by contrast, are characteristically used to express various kinds of modality. Again, then, English does not have mood as a grammatical category: the modal operators may, can, must, etc., are catenatives rather than auxiliaries, the contrast between declarative, interrogative and imperative is a system of the clause rather than the verb, and although the semantic difference between if Ed came tomorrow and if Ed comes tomorrow is a matter of modality this is not the primary or characteristic use of the verbal contrast between came and comes ~ on the basis of the primary use we have taken this contrast to be one of tense, not mood.* 3.3 Modality in relation to time and tense There are just two tenses in English, past and present: unlike such languages as French and Latin, English has no future tense. That is to say that there is no verbal category in English whose primary use is to locate in future time the situation described in the clause. Futurity is of course very often indicated by means of will — compare (16) i He saw her every Friday He sees her every Friday iii He will see her every Friday The will construction, however, does not satisfy the conditions for analysis as a * The account of verb inflection presented in this book is simplified in that it considers only the was variant in examples like If her father was/were still alive, he would he over eighty. Speakers who use were in this construction (and similarly after wish) make some formal distinetion between past time and factual remoteness and can be regarded as having a residual mood dis tinetion in the verb. Thus [He] i [ill] and [#e] was [iff] will contrast in tense, [if he] is [alive] and lifhe} were [alive] in mood. Traditional grammars of English have a fully fledged mood system Interacting with tense to give: past indicative ({He] took [it]), present indicative ({He] takes [it)), Past subjunctive ({if he] cook [it now, ...), present subjunctive ([/ insist thai he] take lif), present imperative (Take [if]); such an analysis, however, involves a great deal more syncretism than can be justified for Modern English. Or, under much more restrictive conditions (e.g. with Ist person subjects), shall: | will discuss the issue in relation to the more general case of will, but the essence of the argument applies equally to shall. In traditional grammar, shall take and will take are analysed as future tenst forms.3 Modality 81 future tense. Grammatically willis a catenative, not an auxiliary ~ hence not the marker of a verbal category. And even if we reanalysed the catenative operators as auxiliaries, will would belong grammatically with can, may and must, which would be mood markers: like them it has no non-tensed forms and shows no person-number agreement with the subject. It enters into relations of contrast with can, may and must, so that we have, for example, He may go vs He will go vs He must go, etc., but not *He may will go, *He will must go, or the like. Conversely, it does not enter into such contrastive relations with the tense markers; on the con- trary, the lexeme will always carries either the past tense inflection (would) or the present (will): the relation of would to will matches that of could to can. From a semantic point of view will involves elements of both futurity and modality. In an example like She will be in London now the modal component is more silient: this is epistemically ‘weaker’ (less assured), clearly, than She is in London now. Nevertheless, there is also an element of futurity ~ relating not of course to the time of her being in London but to the time of verification: it is, as it were, a prediction. In She will be in London next week the futurity component ts more salient, but even with future time situations there remains a modal component in will. As we have seen, will is not essential for future situations ~ we could also have She is in London next week. And the form with will is, at least latently, epistemically weaker than the form without it. Compare, for example, a pair like Kin will win tomorrow's final and Kim wins tomorrow's final. The former is perfectly normal but the latter is not: unless the match has been rigged, we do not have enough present knowledge to justify an epistemically unqualified assertion about the future in such cases. It is in the nature of things that the future should fall less within the domain of what is known than the present or the past, and hence there is a natural association between futurity and modality ~ an association reflected in the meaning of will. Thus will has semantic as well as grammatical affinities with the more obviously modal operators may, can, must, etc Notice, moreover, that with the other modals too the time of the situation is very often interpreted as future — compare Ir may rain (this afternoon), You can go (as soon as you've finished), You must try harder next time, It should be ready soon There is also some association between pastness and modality inasmuch as the past is, in varying degrees, ‘remote’ from the present, thus not immediately accessible. This association is reflected in the use, already noted, of the past tense to indicate factual remoteness as well as past time. The modal use of the past tense is for the most part confined to subordinate clauses, but even in main clauses the past tense ~ provided, significantly, that it is carried by a modal operator ~ can have a meaning relating to modality rather than time: compare You may|might be right (where might suggests a slightly remoter possibility), Can/ Could you come earlier next time(?) (with could considered more polite, again more tentative, than can), or our earlier He'll be/He'd be about seventy now (with ‘d more tentative than ‘//). Indeed with the modal operators this modal use of the past tense is much more frequent than the past time use: the latter is quite restricted, occurring chiefly in combination with the subject-oriented uses (cf. (15ii), or She could swim when she was six months old, etc.).82 Tense, aspect and modality EXERCISES 1. Future time use of the present tense In (17)-(21) we have a future time situation but a verb in the present tense. All are grammatical but some are anomalous or unnatural in that to accept them we need to imagine some rather special context or revise our usual assumptions about the world or culture we live in: discuss the examples of this kind, suggesting contexts or assumptions that would make them acceptable, (17) Australia beats Sweden in the Davis Cup semi-final later this year (18) Tom gives his lecture tomorrow (19) The sun sets at 4.55 tomorrow (20) He dies next week (21) John is tall in two hours Il, Backshifting in indirect reported speech Imagine that Kim utters each of (22)-(27) on a certain Friday and Max reports this on the following Monday by means of a sentence beginning Kim said that ... Complete Max's utterance in each case by giving () the backshifted version and (f) the non-backshifted version. Version (2) will be perfectly acceptable in all cases, but (f) will not; which are those where version (f) would be anomalous and why? (22) No one will understand my theory (23) Thave already written three chapters of my book (24) Thave to slip out and get some milk (25) Tom is arriving on Sunday (26) Ihave a weak heart (27) Ihave a headache IIL. Conditionals The following are examples of the ‘real’ conditional construction: give the corresponding ‘unreal’ conditionals. (As there is a grammatical requirement in Modern English that the superordinate clause in the unreal conditional construction contain a modal operator, it will be necessary to add will in (31).) (28) If he finds out what you've said, he'll be furious (29) If that is true, we may be able to claim compensation (30) If he saw her last night, he will surely have told her the news 31) If they appoint Kim, we're in for a lot of trouble IV. The progressive Give the progressive counterpart of each of the following and comment on the difference in meaning between the progressive and non-progressive versions. (32) Kim reads ‘The Times’ (33) Kim read ‘The Times’ (34) [Kim has] read ‘The Times’Exercises 83 (35) She always drinks tea (36) J mark assignments this week-end V. The perfect Give the perfect counterpart of (37) and the present perfect counterpart of (38) and in each case comment on the difference in meaning. G1) i She works for IBM ii He goes to bed early iii Kim left at six iv [She must] write 10 her father (38) i She overslept this morning i She lived in Canberra all her life iii They found a serious mistake in the proposal iv [twas a pleasure meeting you Vv The prime minister resigned VI. Deontic and epistemic modality Discuss the modal interpretations of (39)-(44). Where both deontic and epistemic interpretations are possible, explain the difference in meaning between them; for those which allow only one, suggest why the other is excluded. (39) He must work faster than the other candidates (40) She must have finished by now (41) He may have told her about it when ke saw her in Sydney (42) You may not see her again (43) Ir needn't have been John who did it (44) Youncedn't answer if you don't want to (45) He should get his hair cut (46) It will have been destroyed before the new government took office last week6 Nouns and noun phrases 1. Nouns The general term ‘noun’ is applied to a grammatically distinct word class in a language having the following properties: (a) It contains amongs sons or concrete objects. its most central members those words that denote per- (b) Its members head phrases ~ noun phrases ~ which characteristically function as subject or object in clause structure and refer to the participants in the situation described in the clause, to the actor, patient, recipient, and so on. (c) It is the class to which the categories of number, gender and case have their primary application in languages which have these grammatical categories. The ‘primary’ application of these categories is to be distinguished from their ‘secondary’ application, as when they are attributable to a rule of agreement. Number in English, for example, applies both to nouns and (in combination with person) to verbs, so that we may contrast, say, The dog bites and The dogs bite. But it applies here primarily to dog and secondarily to bite because the verb takes its (person-) number property from the subject ~ and the reason we put it this way rather than the other way round is that the semantic distinction is a matter of how many dogs are involved, not how many acts of biting. This third property is less important than the first two as it is not necessary for a language to have number, gender or case as inflectionally or analytically marked categories in order for it to have a class of nouns; nevertheless, a great many languages do have one or more of them and we there find the categories applying primarily to the class which by properties (a) and (b) qualifies as the noun class. As far as English is concerned, number is evidently an important category for the characterisation of nouns, whereas gender and case are not: they apply to only a very few nouns of the pronoun subclass. 842 Noun phrase structure 85 At the English-particular level, the three most important properties of nouns, it will be recalled, concern their function, their dependents and their inflection. (a) Function. Nouns usually occupy the head position in the structure of NPs, and the main functions of NPs are: (a) subject, object or predicative in clause structure; (f) complement in PP structure; (y) complement in PossP structure. In addition to functioning as head of an NP, most nouns can function as dependent ~ as modifier of the following noun head. Thus in the NPs student grants, the Thatcher government, a university professor we have nouns not only in head position (grants, government, professor) but also in modifier position (student, Thatcher, university). (b) Dependents. Nouns take different range of dependents than other words the most distinctive are: (2) determinatives such as the, a, my, which, some, this, that, etc.; (B) adjectives as pre-head modifier; (y) restrictive relative clauses. A more detailed account of NP structure will be given in the following sections. (c) Inflection. Prototypical nouns enter into inflectional contrasts of number, singular vs plural. The singular form is the lexical stem, while the plural is formed by a variety of morphological processes. Regular plurals are formed by suffixing: (x) /iz/ or /az/ (horses); (B) [s/ (cats); or (y) /2/ (dogs) — the choice among these variants is determined in the same way as for the 3rd person singular present tense ending of verbs (see 3.3). The most frequent irregular plurals are formed by vowel change: man->men, mouse—mice, and so on, Some plurals are syncretised with the singular: sheep, species, etc. Again we will not take space to describe the irregular forms in detail. We shall distinguish four main subclasses of noun ~ common nouns, proper nouns, pronouns, and cardinal numerals. Common nouns form the unmarked subclass, the ‘one about which nothing special need be said, while proper nouns and pronouns will be surveyed in §§10 and 11; cardinal numerals lie at the periphery between the noun and determinative classes and it will therefore be more convenient to leave them for consideration in the next chapter. 2. Noun phrase structure We turn now from nouns to NPs ~ to phrases with a noun as head. The next eight sections will be concerned with the structure of NPs, the types of dependent found therein, and the NP systems of number, count vs mass, and definitene: Leaving aside elliptical structures, an NP will consist of a noun as head, alone or accompanied by one or more dependents. Some dependents precede the head, others follow: we will distinguish them as pre-head and post-head dependents. ‘The pre-head dependents are of two main types, determiners and modifiers, and for the post-head dependents we recognise the same three types as we distinguish in clause structure ~ complements, modifiers and peripheral dependents:86 Nouns and noun phrases Q) i those fast cars Detnr Mod Head ii her belief in God Detnr Head Comp iii aman with one eve Detnr Head Mod iv Higgins. whom they all feared Head Periph-Dep 3. Determiners Determiners have the form of; (a) determinatives — the, some, which, etc. (reall that ‘determiner’ is here used as the name of a function, ‘determinative’ of a class'); (p) PossPs — the dog's, your father’s, the King of Spain's, etc. ()) cardinal numerals: one, two, three, etc.; (d) embedded NPs expressing quantification: @ dozen, two dozen, a few, etc. An NP may contain up to three determiners, as in all her many virtues. ‘The relative order is fixed (witness *many all her virtues, etc.) and we will therefore distinguish three determiner positions, I, II, III. We take I] as basic, and define 1 and III by reference to II. Il is the position of the definite article she, the indefinite article a, the possessives my, your, etc. - and all other determiners which enter only into relations of contrast, not combination, with these. Some, for example, belongs here because we have the book, some book, but not *the some book, *my some book, and so on. Positions | and II are then filled by the items which can respectively precede and follow position II determiners. The main forms, or types of forms, to be found in the three positions are shown in (2). (2) 1 all. both; such, whar (exclamative); half, one-third, three-quarters, and other frac- tions; double, vice, three times, ete I the: afan; the demonstratives this, these, that, those; my, your, the boy's, the King of England's, and other possessives; we, us, vou; some, any, no, either, neither, another; each, enough, much, more, most, less; a few, a little; which, what (interrogative or relative) IIL one, nvo, three, and other cardinal numerals; (a) d many, several, few, little: every There are, however, very severe limitations on how forms from the three positions may combine: a comprehensive grammar will need to give detailed rules that will allow, say, both these books but not *both some books, her every gesture but not *shis every gesture, and so on What is assigned to position [in its exclamative use because here it can precede a What a marvellous idea it was!. In its interrogative and relative uses, however, it cannot combine with a (or any other item from IT) and thus belongs to position Il: What (*a) book would you recommend? (interrogative), What (*some) money 1 have {is in the bank} (relative). Few and little belong under III because they can follow the, demonstratives, possessives, relative what, etc., as in these few correc- ' ‘Determiner’ is often used as a class term, and ‘determinative’, a much less common term, is ‘occasionally applied to the function.4 Number 87 tions, what little money Thave. A few and a little by contrast are each single dete! miners, not a sequence of II (a) + TL (few/litle): in a few corrections, for example, a does not enter into construction with corrections, for it requires a singular (a correction, not *a corrections), and similarly it is clear that in Show a little gratitude the a goes with little, not gratitude, Similarly we must distinguish that many corrections (with that many a single determiner) vs these many corrections (with these and many separate determiners). Note then that some words, such as this and shat, and also the, any and no, belong both to the class of determinatives and to the class of adverbs of degree: as determinatives they enter into construction with nouns (this decision, the many drawbacks), while as adverbs of degree they enter into construction with adjectives, adverbs or determinatives ([He’s] this tall, The sooner [he leaves, the better], (I haven't got] that much [money]. Determiners play a major role in the NP contrasts singular vs plural, count vs mass and definite vs indefinite: we will accordingly take these up now before turn ing to modifiers and their relationship to determiners. 4. Number Prototypical noun lexemes, we have seen, have two inflectional forms contrasting in number: in such cases the number is selected independently of the lexeme. Else- where, however, there is no contrast and the number, sometimes singular, some- inherent property of the lexical item, as illustrated in times plural, is G) i equipment, knowledge, muck, wees ) quip jowledge, muck, wetness Stogular ii news, linguistics, mathematics (4) i clothes, dregs, remains, earnings, pyjamas, scissors Bia ii cattle. people (*persons”), police (policemen/women”) ‘ The items in (3ii) do not look like singulars in that they end in -s, but clearly they are singular (cf. This news is excellent vs *These news are excellent) and the -5 is, not here to be analysed as the plural suffix. Similarly, those in (4ii) do not look like plurals, but very clearly are: they are syntactically plural (cf. These cattle are in need of attention) even though they cannot be said to carry the plural inflection. ‘The category of number applies to NPs as well as to nouns, Normally the number of an NP derives from that of the noun head, so that the NPs a shortage of paper and a shortage of papers, say, will both be singular by virtue of having singular shortage as head. One exception to this is illustrated in (5) i A lot of paper was destroyed ii A lot of papers were destroyed As is evident from the verb form, a lor of paper is singular but a /ot of papers is plural, Thus here the number of the NP derives not from the head /or but from the embedded NPs paper and papers within the of phrase complement. 4 lor might be described as ‘number-transparent’ ~ it allows the number of the NP embedded within the of phrase complement to flow through, as it were, and fix88 Nouns and noun phrases that of the whole NP. (The of phrase may be omitted in ellipsis, as in A lor was/ were destroyed, but then the number of the NP a /of depends on the understood complement.) Other examples of number-transparent expressions are /ors, plenty, the restiremainder and, for some speakers, a number (though the latter allows only a following plural, not a singular like that of (i). Semantically a lor of in (ii) is equivalent to many, and this is reflected in the number assignment. Structur- ally, however, they are quite different: many papers is a simple NP with many determiner and papers head, while a lot of papers is a complex NP with for head of the upper NP, papers head of the embedded one. Normally any person-number property in the verb is determined by agreement, or ‘concord’, with the NP subject ~ it is on this basis that we have argued that the news is singular, the cattle and a lot of papers plural. There are, however, certain places where semantic factors intervene to produce grammatical *d cord’, Thus we have 3rd person singular verbs with grammatically plural subjects in ‘The Three Musketeers’ is well written, where the reference is to a single novel, or in Eight cups isn't enough, where one is talking about the quantity of cups, a semantically singular concept (though concordant aren't is equally possible). The opposite situation — non-(3rd person) singular verb with singular subject ~ is found with collective nouns, as in The jury have not yet reached a decision. (Again, concordant has is possible, and tends to be preferred in US English.) A collective noun denotes a set or collection of separate members. And it is of course the semantic plurality of the members that overrides the grammatical singularity of the collective noun when a discordant verb form is selected. Such discord is not always possible: we could not substitute a discordant form in, say, The jury consists of twelve women (where the predicate applies to the jury as a whole). We noted at the end of §3 that determiners play a role in the number system: this is because some of them are normally restricted to NPs with a singular or with a plural head. Thus a, another, either, neither, much, a little (and for some speakers fess), every, little and one require a singular head. And both, we, us, a few, many, several, few, the cardinal numerals, a dozen, and so on, require a plural. In addition the demonstratives this and that have contrasting number forms (this/these, that/those) selected in agreement with the head. 5. Count and mass uses of nouns Consider now the interpretation of the noun cake in (6) i Kim offered me a cake ii Kim offered me some more cake In (i) cake has an ‘individuated’ or count interpretation; a typical contextualisation could be one where there is a plate with a number of separate small cakes on, with Kim inviting me to take one: a cake applies to an item from a larger set of discrete Some grammars match the syntax to the semantics by treating papers as head of a lot of papers as well as of many papers: a lot of is then some kind of ‘complex’ determinative5 Count and mass uses of nouns 89 units that could be counted. In (ii), on the other hand, cake has an ‘unbounded’ or mass interpretation: it is here conceived of as a substance rather than as a unit. Similarly coffee has a count interpretation in I'll just get myself another coffee but a mass interpretation in I'd rather have coffee than tea: the former involves indivi- duation (in this particular case typically into servings ~ cups, say), while the latter is concerned simply with coffee the substance, liquid or solid. With a count interpretation it generally makes sense to ask ‘How many?": How many cakes|coffees did you have?, whereas with a mass interpretation the corresponding question would ask ‘How much”: How much cake|coffee did you have?. Interpretation as count or mass depends primarily on the following factors: (a) Number. A plural normally triggers a count interpretation: in Kim offered me some more cakes, for example, cake has the interpretation that it has in (6i), not (ii). Exceptional cases where a plural does not have a count interpretation involve nouns which are inherently, non-contrastively plural; thus how many does not combine with such plurals as dregs, remains, earnings, ete., from (4i). (b) Determiners. With singular nouns, the determiners one, a, another, each, every, either, neither force a count interpretation, whereas enough, much, most, little and unstressed some or any induce a mass interpretation - compare another) every cake with enough/some (= /som)) cake. A singular common noun without any determiner ~ more precisely, without any determiner from positions IT or II] will normally take a mass interpretation: He drinks whisky, She had lost all interest in the project. (c) Inherent properties of the noun. Some nouns occur only with a mass interpre~ tation. The clearest are those like equipment and information which not only have no plural counterparts but which also exclude the determiners requiring a count interpretation: They have good equipment/*a good equipment. Such plurals as dregs, remains, earnings mentioned under (a) above, also take only a mass interpretation even though they are plural. Conversely, there are nouns like individual, entity, unit, thing, which take only a count interpretation. It is then standard practice in grammars to talk of mass nouns (such as equipment) and count nouns (such as individual). But it should be borne in mind that the majority of nouns can be used with either kind of interpretation ~ although one will very often be significantly more normal, frequent, easy to contextualise than the other. Know~ ledge, for example, is used as a mass noun in straightforward cases like They had little knowledge of the subject, but although it has no plural it can combine with a (provided there is some modifier present), as in They had a good knowledge of the subject: the a indicates that the knowledge in question is treated as separable from other areas of knowledge, as bounded or delimited, so that we have here an individuated, count interpretation, albeit a non-prototypical one. Book is normally used as a count noun, but it is just possible to use it as a mass noun, as in These creatures have been living on a diet of book. A glance at a dictionary will show that words in general and nouns in particular typically exhibit polysemy, i.e90 Nouns and noun phrases have a range of meanings - and the lexical entry for a given noun will then often contain a mixture of basically mass meanings and basically count meanings. Sil- ver, for example, is primarily used to denote a certain metal, and this is a basically mass meaning, but it can also have a sense incorporating “medal”, as in We won a silver in the women's marathon, which is a count meaning. However, it is certainly not necessary to cater fully for the count/mass distinction in the lexicon: some of the variation can be handled by means of general rules. Given, for example, that coffee denotes a substance from which drinks are made and thus has a basic mass meaning, it is predictable that it can be used in a count sense incorporating either “serving” (I'll get myself another coffee) or “kind/variety” (This isn't a very good coffee: it’s too bitter). 6. Definiteness Two of the most important determiners are the definite article she and the indefinite article a(n). The contrast is seen in an elementary pair of examples like ) i The dog (was barking] Definite ii A dog (was barking} Indefinite As the name implies, she indicates that the description contained in the rest of the NP ~ in this case dog ~ is presented as sufficient, in the context, to ‘define’ the referent, to distinguish it from everything else. The simplest case is where the description is unique, as in the Prime Minister of Australia from 1972 to 1975: there is only one person (Gough Whitlam) satisfying that description, and hence the is, in order. More often, however, the speaker or writer relies on the context to sup- plement the information given in the description. There are, for example, millions of dogs, so that it would be appropriate for me to use (i) only if the context was such as to make clear which I was referring to. One common case is where the referent has been mentioned before: A dog and a couple of cats had been locked up in the shed; the dog was barking — here indefinite a dog introduces a dog into the context of discourse and we can then go on to refer to that same dog by means of definite the dog. But (i) does not of course require previous mention of the dog: the question of which dog I am referring to may be contextually resolved by virtue of my owning a single dog, of there being a single dog in the house I was in, and so on. Indefinite a then simply indicates that the following description is not presented as defining. If the description clearly 1s defining, @ will be out of place (cf. The|*An oldest boy in the class was just over 15), but a certainly does not require that the description be non-unique: He was reading a book on acoustic phonetics by Martin Joos in no way commits the speaker to there being more than one such book. A is used only with singular count nouns, while she can also occur with plurals and mass nouns (The dogs were barking, The equipment is faulty). The category of definiteness applies to NPs in general, not just those containing the definite or indefinite article. Other determiners that mark an NP as definite are the demonstratives this and that, we/us and you, possessives and both ~ this6 Definiteness 1 cup, we Australians, your nose, both parties. The NP is again presented as providing defining information, but this time part of that information is given by the determiner itself: your nose refers to something defined by the two properties of being a nose and of being yours. A definite NP may also be marked as such by the head alone, when this position is filled by a proper name, a definite personal pronoun (J, you, he, etc.) or a demonstrative pronoun (this, that). Thus the referent of Tis defined by the property of being the speaker or writer, that of John by the property of bearing that name ~ and since there are in fact lots of people (and indeed animals) named John, successful reference will depend on the question of which John is intended being contextually resolved, just as with the she dog in (i). The contrast between definite and indefinite is not to be confused with that between specific and non-specific. The latter contrast is illustrated in (8) i Kimwas talking to a doctor Kim was looking for a doctor It follows from (i) that there was some specific doctor ~ Dr Richards, for example that Kim was talking to, but it does not similarly follow from (ii) that there was a particular doctor that Kim was looking for: we will say, then, that in (i) a doctor is specific, while in (ii) ~ or at least in the more natural interpretation of (ii) ~ it is non-specific. Non-specific NPs are usually indefinite, but they do not have to be: Kim was looking for the best place to park, for example, does not imply that there was some specific place that she was looking for. Whether an NP is interpreted as specific or non-specific depends in general on the larger construction in which it appears: in (8), for example, the difference is attributable to the semantic properties of talk and look for, with the NP itself, a doctor, being the same in either case. There are, however, two determiners, any and either, which occur exclusively in non-specific NPs. This is why we could not replace @ by any ot either in an example like When I arrived Kim was talking to a doctor, for the context requires a specific reading for the final NP. Also cutting across the definite/indefinite division is that between generic and non-generie: (9) i The whale {is an endangered species] Generic, definite ii The whale [had beached itself] Non-generic, de (10) i A wallet {is for keeping paper money in] Generic, indefinite ii A wallet (was lying on the desk] Non-generie, indefinite The whale in (9i) has a generic interpretation in that it applies to the class of whales as a whole, and a waller in (10i) is generic in that the sentence expresses a generalisation applying to members of the class of wallets. Generic NPs are necessarily non-specific, but not all non-specific NPs, of course, are generic: (8ii), for example, does not express a generalisation about doctors. Generic NPs usually have one of the following forms: she + singular count noun, a+ singular count noun, plural count noun (Wallets are for ...), singular mass noun (Mer- cury is used in thermometers). The semantic contrast between the and a is not the92 Nouns and noun phrases same as in non-generic NPs and in some cases they are interchangeable: The/A leopard has a dark-spotted yellowish-fawn coat. 7. Pre-head modifiers The pre-head modifier position can be filled by expressions from a variety of classes - notably, but not exclusively: (a) adjectives: [a] big [mistake], young [chil~ dren}; (p) nouns: [a] Yorkshire [accent], steel (girders); (y) participial forms of verbs: falling [prices}, [the] predicted [result]; (6) PossPs: [an] old people's (home), [al ladies’ [1oiler). Strictly speaking, the modifiers in ()-(3) should be analysed in the first instance as phrases rather than words, for they may themselves have a modifier head structure: a very big mistake, a North Yorkshire accent, rapidly falling prices. In the first of these, for example, very modifies big and very big in turn modifies mistake. There is no grammatical limit to the number of pre-head modifiers a noun head may take. A strong Yorkshire accent has two, a big black Holden sedan has three, and so on. Considerable restrictions apply to the relative order of modi~ fiers: for example, nouns follow most kinds of adjective (cf. *a Yorkshire strong accent), and adjectives of colour normally follow adjectives of size (a big black cat is much more natural than a black big cat). But it is difficult to decide to what extent the restrictions are to be handled by rules of grammar; a black big cat is hardly UNGRAMMATICAL ~ its status is surely different from that of *many her vir- ‘ues, where the requirement that her precede many is very clearly a matter of grammar. Let us turn now to the distinction between the determiner and modifier functions. At the language-particular level they are distinguished primarily by linear order: determiners normally precede modifiers. (The order modifier + determiner is restricted to cases where the modifier begins with how, so, foo and the determiner is a: how big a mistake, too serious a crime.) The prototypical determiners are the, aand items which behave grammatically like them, while the prototypical modifiers are gradable adjectives like big, strong, good, etc. (more properly the phrases headed by them). Gradable adjectives are those that inflect for grade and/or take degree modifiers as in bigger, very big, etc. Such adjectives can normally be used predicatively as well as attributively - compare The dog was big (predicative) and the big dog (attributive); the central determiners, by contrast, are not used predicatively: *Dog was the. The distinction between the two kinds of dependent is far from clear-cut: such position III determiners as many and few are gradable and are occasionally used predicatively (Her virtues were many/few) while such modifiers as mere and utter are non-gradable and restricted to attributive use. Nevertheless the differences between the and big, say, are significant cnough to justify our recognising different functions here even if the boundary between them is somewhat fuzzy. At the general level, the determiner position is one characteristically filled by members of a closed class and involved in the marking of such NP systems as definiteness, number, quantification, countability. The modifier position within

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