Andrew Radford - Linguistics An Introduction [Second Edition]

naughty but nice

b.

your money or your life

c.

Harriet is English but she speaks Russian

These conjunctions serve to join words or phrases together to form larger

phrases of the same type (99a, b), or join whole sentences together to form new sentences (99c).

Table 14 Personal pronouns in English

number

singular

plural

person

first

I/me

we/us

second

thou/thee/you

you

third

he/him, she/her, it

they/them

(The second person singular pronoun thou/thee is obsolete in standard

dialects of Modern English, though it survives in other varieties.)

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The subordinating conjunction that has already been mentioned in connection

with (92). In modern linguistics, words like this are known as complementisers (C) because one of their most important uses is to introduce complement clauses (i.e. clauses which function as the complement of a verb, adjective or noun).

Additional examples of this type are shown in (100):

(100) a.

Tom wonders [if it will rain]

b.

Tom arranged [ for Dick to leave early]

Each of the bracketed clauses in (100) is a complement clause, since it serves as the complement of the bold-face verb.

Up to this point, then, we have seen that it is necessary to recognise at least five lexical categories (N, V, A, ADV, P) in the grammar of English along with a number of functional categories (D, AUX, PRN, CONJ, C). We have also

suggested that category membership will be specified as part of a word’s lexical representation in the lexicon. Without wishing to suggest that our set of categories is exhaustive, we shall now focus on verbs and on some of the complexities which arise in consideration of their morphological properties.

The morphological properties of English verbs

Verbs in English have a simple form, such as read, write, illustrate,

called the base form. However, consider the verbs in sentences such as Tom reads poetry, Dick writes letters, Harriet illustrates comics. These are in a special form, consisting of the base form plus an ending -s. This form is used whenever the word or phrase referring to the person doing the reading, writing or illustrating (i.e. the subject) is third person singular and the verb is in the present tense. The -s form is not used for any other person (I, we, you) or for third person plural subjects: I/we/you read / *reads novels, the girls write / *writes letters. Because of these different verb forms, we say that the verb agrees with its subject.

In English, the agreement system has almost entirely disappeared (in some

dialects it has completely withered away, see section 16), and the third person singular agreement form in the present tense is its last vestige.

The special agreement forms for third person singular subjects are characteristic of verbs as a class. Other special forms of this class are shown in (101): (101) a.

Harriet took a picture of Dick

b.

Harriet is taking a picture of Dick

c.

Harriet has taken a picture of Dick

Verbs typically signal the time when an action or event occurs. In (101a), the picture-taking event is presented as taking place in the past, whereas in (101b), it is presented as unfolding at present. In (101c), the event took place in the past, but because of the use of the auxiliary have, the action is perceived as retaining

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relevance for the present (so that 101c might be taken as implying that the picture of Dick is available and could be viewed).

The use of the special form took in (101a) signals Tense, which is primarily used to indicate the time at which an event took place (but also has secondary uses, as in I wish you took me seriously). In this case, we have the past tense, indicating that the event occurred before the moment at which (101a) is uttered. The form took is, in fact, an irregular past tense form. Regular verbs in English form their past tense by adding the (orthographic) suffix -(e)d: applauded, barked, snored.

Because of this, people often refer to the past tense form as the -d form of a verb.

The verbs in (101b, c) are in special forms used with the auxiliaries be in (101b) and have in (101c). The ing-form is sometimes referred to as a present participle, but the fact that it can occur in past tense sentences like she was working or she had been resting shows that this is an inappropriate term. A better description is found in those pedagogical grammars which say that ing-forms (in sentences like

101b) are ‘progressive’ or ‘continuous’ forms which mark an on-going action that continues to be in progress at the time in question: for this reason, we will refer to verb forms like that in (101b) as progressive participles. Such sentences illustrate the progressive aspect. However, when we just want to concentrate on the form of the verb and not necessarily on its function we can simply refer to the -ing form.

The form taken in (101c) is traditionally referred to as a past participle: but this again is an inappropriate description which wrongly implies that such a form can always be used together with expressions referring to past times, such as yesterday. This is not the case, otherwise it would be possible to say things like *Harriet has taken a picture of Dick yesterday. More accurate terminology for forms such as taken in sentences such as (101c) is perfect participle. The point of this term is that the perfect participle is used to form the perfect aspect construction, which marks the fact that an action has been completed. Again, if we just want to talk about the form we can refer to the -n form of the verb, although a little caution is necessary here as the perfect participles of all regular verbs involve the addition not of -(e)n but of -(e)d (e.g. he has walked a long way, she has jumped over the stream). Even in these circumstances, however, a perfect participle ending in -(e)d is referred to as the -n form of the verb! Some justification for this apparent perversity will be given in the next section.

The auxiliary be is referred to as a progressive auxiliary when it’s used in progressive aspect sentences such as (101b). By the same token, the auxiliary have, when used in conjunction with a perfect participle, is known as a perfect auxiliary. We can now see that it is the combinations of auxiliary verb and special forms of the lexical verb that give us two different kinds of aspect, whether it is on-going (progressive) or completed (perfect). We can also have the combination of progressive and perfect has been taking pictures.

When a word appears in a variety of forms depending on its grammatical role in the sentence, we say that it inflects or undergoes inflection. A category such as Tense is therefore called an inflectional category. The category of Tense has two forms, past and non-past in English, signalled in the case under discussion by took

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(past) versus take/takes (non-past). Specific values of an inflectional category of this sort are called inflectional properties, and we shall have more to say about these in the next section.

Earlier, we noted that the phrase referring to whoever or whatever is performing the action denoted by the verb is referred to as the subject of the sentence.

Additionally, the phrase referring to whoever or whatever is affected by the action denoted by the verb, one type of complement, is referred to as the verb’s object.

Now, there are many verbs such as sleep and hop that refer to states or activities which are not directed towards another entity; as a consequence, such verbs

cannot occur with objects and they are called intransitive verbs. By contrast, verbs which do take objects are called transitive.