Andrew Radford - Linguistics An Introduction [Second Edition]

The sentence in (246a) is said to be declarative in function, in that it is used to make a statement; by contrast, (246b) is interrogative since it serves to ask a

254

senten ces

question and (246c) is an imperative sentence used to issue an order or command.

Finally, (246d) is an exclamative sentence, used to exclaim surprise or delight. In complex sentences, each clause has its own function, as we can see in relation to the examples in (247):

(247) a.

He asked who had helped me

b.

Did you know he had escaped?

c.

You tell him what a great time we had!

In (247a), the main (asked) clause is declarative, whereas the complement (helped) clause is interrogative; in (247b), the main (know) clause is interrogative, whereas the complement (escaped) clause is declarative; and in (247c), the main (tell) clause is imperative, whereas the complement (had) clause is exclamative.

The structure of the main clause in (247c) is particularly interesting. It comprises the subject you, the predicate tell (which is an imperative verb form in this use), the pronoun complement him and the clause complement what a great time we had!

So, (247c) shows us that some verbs may have more than one complement – in this case, tell has both a pronoun complement and a clause complement, and this is a reflection of the fact that tell has three arguments corresponding to someone doing the telling, someone being told, and something being told (exercise 2).

Our discussion here has shown that sentences are built up out of one or more clauses: each clause contains a subject and a predicate and may contain one or more complements and/or adjuncts as well. As we shall see in the next section, clauses too have a complex internal structure and are typically built up out of a sequence of phrases. We can illustrate the difference between a phrase and a clause in terms of the two different kinds of reply which speaker B can give to speaker A’s question in the following dialogue:

(248)

speaker a: When does the president smoke cigars?

speaker b: He smokes cigars after dinner. (reply1)

After dinner. (reply 2)

Here, reply 1 is clearly a clause, since it comprises the subject he and the predicate smokes, as well as the complement cigars and an adjunct after dinner. By contrast, reply 2 isn’t a clause, since it contains no subject and no predicate: in traditional terms, it is a phrase. For our purposes, we can define a phrase informally as a sequence of two or more words which is not a clause (because it does not contain a subject and/or predicate), but which can nevertheless serve as a free-standing expression and be used, e.g., as a reply to an appropriate kind of question. In the

next section, we turn to look at how words can be combined to form phrases, phrases combined to form clauses, and clauses combined to form complex sentences.

Exercises

1.

In relation to the sentences below, say what case each of the bracketed

pronoun or noun expressions carries, and whether each italicised

Basic terminology

255

verb/auxiliary is finite or non-finite. Give reasons in support of the

analysis you present.

(a) [John] has been following [you]

(b) [Jane] suspects [he] was lying to [the police]

(c) [Someone] would appear to have vandalised [the chairman’s] car

(d) [People] expect [politicians] to be accountable to [the electorate]

(e) [The authorities] seem to have had [the demonstrators] arrested

(f) [You] should not let [other people] exploit [you]

(g) [Mary] thinks [her] mother may be expecting [her] to wait for [her]

Model answer for (1a) -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The table of case forms in (223) in the main text shows that names like John and pronouns like you are case-ambiguous forms which can be

either nominative or accusative. One way to tell whether each is

nominative or accusative as they are used in (1a) is to replace them by a case-unambiguous pronoun (i.e. one which has distinct nominative,

accusative and genitive forms) like he/him/his. If we do this, we find

that John in (1a) can be replaced by he but not by him (He/*Him has been following you) and so must be nominative, whereas you can be

replaced by him but not by he (cf. John has been following him/*he) and

so must be accusative. As for the verb forms in (1a), it is clear that has is a finite form since it has a nominative subject and inflects for

both tense and agreement (has being a third person singular present

tense form). By contrast, been and following are non-finite partici-

ple forms, been being a perfect participle form (carrying the perfect

aspect inflection -en) and following a progressive participle form.

2.

Analyse the structure of the clauses in the examples below:

(a) I know that two prisoners escaped from jail yesterday

(b) Did someone say the prisoners shot a guard?

(c) That kind of incident, I don’t think anyone could have foreseen

(d) What a lot of questions the press asked about how the prisoners

escaped!

(e) Somebody please tell me which guard the prisoners seriously

wounded

(f) The authorities will severely punish the prisoners who organised

the escape

(g) Does anyone know which prisoners made the knives which they

were carrying?

(h) Which of the comments which the governor made have most

antagonised the guards whom the prisoners brutally attacked?

More specifically, say how many clauses each sentence contains, what

the grammatical function of each clause is (e.g. main clause, complement

256

senten ces

clause, relative clause), what type each clause is (e.g. declarative, inter-

rogative, imperative, exclamative), what the constituents of each clause

are, and what function each constituent serves within its containing

clause (e.g. subject, predicate, complement or adjunct).

Model answer for (2a) -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sentence (2a) contains two predicates (know and escaped) and so comprises two clauses – a main clause and a complement clause.

The complement clause is that two prisoners escaped yesterday and is

declarative in type (and so is introduced by the declarative complemen-

tiser that). In addition to the complementiser that, the complement

clause comprises the predicate escaped, the subject two prisoners and

the adjunct yesterday. The main clause contains the predicate know, the

subject I and the complement that two prisoners escaped yesterday: the

main clause is also declarative in type.

19

Sentence structure

In this section, we shall look at the way in which words are combined to form phrases, phrases are combined to form clauses, and clauses are combined to form complex sentences. This involves the introduction of our first core syntactic operation, that of merger.

Merger

To put our discussion on a concrete footing, let’s consider how an

elementary two-word phrase such as that produced by speaker B in the following mini-dialogue is formed:

(249)

speaker a: What is the government planning to do?

speaker b: Reduce taxes.

As speaker B’s reply illustrates, the simplest way of forming a phrase is by joining two words together: for example, by combining the word reduce with the word taxes in (249), we form the phrase reduce taxes. Just as every compound word has a head (so that mill is the head of the compound windmill because a windmill is a kind of mill, not a kind of wind: section 10), so too every syntactic phrase has a head word. For example, the head word of the phrase reduce taxes in (249) is the verb reduce, and accordingly the overall phrase reduce taxes is said to be a verb phrase. One reason for thinking this is that the phrase reduce taxes describes a particular kind of reduction activity (that of reducing taxes), not a particular kind of tax. Moreover, since the head word of a phrase determines not only its semantic properties but also its grammatical properties, our claim that the verb reduce is the head of the phrase reduce taxes correctly