Andrew Radford - Linguistics An Introduction [Second Edition]

speaker a: I’d like a cup of coffee.

speaker b: The shop across the street is still open.

There is no reason to regard this as anything other than a well-formed conversation, but quite a complex set of assumptions underlie this judgement. For

instance, if the shop across the street is known by both participants to be a shoe shop, the well-formedness of (220) immediately evaporates (unless they know the shop’s staff well, and know that they will be invited into the back room for a cup of coffee); A and B knowing that the shop across the street sells coffee is a condition on the well-formedness of (220), but, while relevant to an account of language use, this has nothing to do with knowledge of language. What is sometimes known as pragmatics is undoubtedly interesting in its own right, and in recognition of this,

section 27 introduces some of the issues that arise when this study is seriously pursued. In the remainder of this part of the book, however (sections 18 to 26), our emphasis is unashamedly restricted to the considerations of the properties of phrases and sentences as structured linguistic objects with no heed being paid to how they might be used in communicative settings.

Ever since Chomsky’s ideas began to be influential in linguistics, syntax has probably been the area where most research effort has been directed, with the consequence that a rather large number of different theoretical accounts have developed, each with its specialised terminology (for instance, the lexical functional grammar 245

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of Joan Bresnan and her colleagues and the head-driven phrase structure grammar most closely associated with the work of Carl Pollard and Ivan Sag). What we shall do in this part of the book is introduce one such account which is based on fairly recent work of Chomsky himself. In doing this, we shall be able to bring into the discussion a wide range of basic syntactic ideas that will be transferable to theoretical frameworks which differ from that adopted here. Of course, these frameworks also have their own vocabularies and theoretical constructs, but

acquaintance with what follows in this part of the book should enable readers to approach such alternatives with increased confidence.

Sections 18–23 contain the core theoretical ideas of this part of the book. The first of these sections builds on section 9 in introducing basic, traditional terminology for talking about phrases and sentences. Section 19 examines in detail one of the core operations in the theory of grammar, that whereby two linguistic objects are combined to create a third, complex object. Of course, we have already met combinatory processes in morphology (affixation and compounding), but the operation introduced here is different from these.

Scientific progress in a field often involves the postulation of theoretical entities with intuitively odd properties (e.g. gravity in Newton’s physics, or the properties of subatomic particles in modern physics). Empty categories, that is positions in linguistic structures which are occupied by nothing audible or visible, but which nonetheless have syntactic and semantic properties constitute one of the contributions of syntax to this catalogue, and they are introduced in section 20. There is ample evidence to suggest that some linguistic expressions, having combined with others, can subsequently move into another position in a structure. Movement, another major operation in the syntactic theory we introduce here, is the topic of section 21.

In parts I and II of the book, we have examined linguistic variation from a

sociolinguistic perspective. The applications of this perspective to syntax have to date not been extensive. However, the study of variation per se, between varieties of a language, historical periods of a language and between different languages has received a great deal of attention. How variation can be dealt with in the theoretical framework developed here is the topic of section 22. Finally, section 23 introduces some of the semantic issues that are of importance in the study of sentences, including considerations of Logical Form (see the Introduction, p. 5), a level of syntactic representation relevant to the interpretation of sentences that relies heavily on another construct with unusual properties, invisible movement.

The next three sections of this part of the book utilise the theoretical framework in examining the child’s acquisition of grammar (section 24), adult processing of sentences (section 25) and syntactic disorders of language (section 26). Certain ideas that can be formulated rather naturally within the framework we adopt are seen to be fundamentally important in understanding issues which arise in these areas. Equally importantly, these areas offer additional perspectives for testing and expanding the scope of syntactic theories.

As noted above, this part of the book concludes with a discussion of sentence use, where we introduce some of the key ideas in pragmatics and conversational analysis.

18

Basic terminology

A substantial proportion of the terminology we need in order to embark on the study of syntax has already been introduced, particularly in section 9. However, there are some additional notions which are important for us to understand, so in this section we shall introduce these, integrating them with ideas with which we are already familiar.

Categories and functions

It is traditionally said that sentences are structured out of words,

phrases and clauses, each of which belongs to a specific grammatical category and serves a specific grammatical function within the sentence containing it. The lexical and functional categories from section 9 are examples of grammatical categories, and as our discussion proceeds, we shall see how phrases and clauses can be categorised. The smallest type of sentence which we can produce is one containing a single clause, such as (221):

(221)

John smokes

This comprises the noun John, which is traditionally claimed to function as the subject of the clause (in that it denotes the person performing the act of smoking), and the verb smokes, which functions as the predicate of the clause (in that it describes the act being performed). Consider next the slightly longer clause in (222):

(222)

John smokes cigars

Here we have the subject John, the predicate smokes and a third item, cigars, which is the complement (cigars refers to the entities on which the act of smoking is being performed). The subject John and the complement cigars are the two

arguments of the predicate smokes (i.e. the two entities involved in the act of smoking). A clause is an expression which contains a subject and a predicate, and which may also contain other types of element (e.g. the clause in 222 contains a complement as well, and so has the form subject + predicate + complement).

There are a number of morphological and syntactic properties which differ-

entiate subjects from complements. For one thing, the two occupy different positions within the clause: in English, subjects generally precede predicates and 247

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complements follow them. Moreover (with an exception to be noted later),

subjects generally have different case properties to complements. The different case forms of typical pronouns and noun expressions in English are given in (223): (223)

nominative

accusative

genitive

I

me

my/mine

we

us

our/ours

you

you

your/yours

he

him

his

she

her

her/hers

it

it

its

they

them

their/theirs

who

who(m)

whose

Mary

Mary

Mary’s

the dog

the dog

the dog’s

Genitive forms are used (amongst other things) to mark possession. Some pro-