Chicken Nuggets, Sample of Dissertations

22 pages, 10782 words

P1 : FCH

CU097 -FM

CU097 -Huddleston.cls

February 7 , 2002

22 :31

The Cambridge

Grammar

of the English

Language

Rodney Huddleston

Geoffrey K. Pullum

in collaboration with Laurie Bauer

Betty Birner

Ted Briscoe

Peter Collins

David Denison

David Lee

Anita Mittwoch

Geoffrey Nunberg

Frank Palmer

John Payne

Peter Peterson

Lesley Stirling

Gregory Ward

P1 : FCH

CU097 -FM

CU097 -Huddleston.cls

February 7 , 2002

22 :31

published by the press syndicate of the university of cambridge

The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

cambridge university press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK

40 West 20th Street, New York, ny 10011 -4211 , USA

477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207 , Australia

Ruiz de Alarcon 13 , 28014 Madrid, Spain

Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town, 8001 , South Africa

http://www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press 2002

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,

no reproduction of any part may take place without

the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

19 pages, 9116 words

The Term Paper on University Press Utopia Cambridge London

Utopian Texts Chronological List of Utopian Texts Note: not all of these texts are necessarily 'utopias' in the strict sense (whether there can be said to be a strict sense of this term is another matter), but they all have elements of the genre - or are used in our course. Several early modern utopian texts can be found in digital reproductions of the original editions on Early English Books ...

First published 2002

Printed in the United Kingdom by William Clowes Ltd, Beccles, Suffolk

Typefaces Adobe Minion 10/13 pt & ffTheSans

System LTEX 2 ε [tb]

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data

Huddleston, Rodney D.

The Cambridge grammar of the English language /

Rodney Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum

cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 0 521 43146 8 (hardback)

1 . English language – Grammar. i. Pullum, Geoffrey K.

pe1106.h74 2002 425 –dc21 2001025630

isbn 0 521 43146 8 (hardback)

ii. Title.

P1 : FCH

CU097 -FM

CU097 -Huddleston.cls

February 7 , 2002

22 :31

Contents

List of contributors vi

Notational conventions x

Tree diagrams xiii

Preface xv

1 Preliminaries 1

Geoffrey K. Pullum and Rodney Huddleston

2 Syntactic overview 43

Rodney Huddleston

3 The verb 71

Rodney Huddleston

4 The clause: complements 213

Rodney Huddleston

5 Nouns and noun phrases 323

John Payne and Rodney Huddleston

6 Adjectives and adverbs 525

Geoffrey K. Pullum and Rodney Huddleston

7 Prepositions and preposition phrases 597

Geoffrey K. Pullum and Rodney Huddleston

8 The clause: adjuncts 663

Anita Mittwoch, Rodney Huddleston, and Peter Collins

9 Negation 785

Geoffrey K. Pullum and Rodney Huddleston

10 Clause type and illocutionary force 851

Rodney Huddleston

11 Content clauses and reported speech 947

Rodney Huddleston

12 Relative constructions and unbounded dependencies 1031

Rodney Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum, and Peter Peterson

13 Comparative constructions 1097

Rodney Huddleston

14 Non-finite and verbless clauses 1171

Rodney Huddleston

15 Coordination and supplementation 1273

Rodney Huddleston, John Payne, and Peter Peterson

16 Information packaging 1363

Gregory Ward, Betty Birner, and Rodney Huddleston

2 pages, 998 words

Running Head Book Review Of The Frank Pacettas Book

Running head: BOOK REVIEW OF THE FRANK PACETTAS BOOK DONT FIRE THEM, FIRE THEM UP Book Review of the Frank Pacettas book Dont Fire Them, Fire Them Up August 13, 2008 Book Review of the Frank Pacettas book Dont Fire Them, Fire Them Up Frank Pacettas book is obviously one of the most exciting books about leadership. This is a real-world story enabling the readers to gain a victory in a competitive ...

17 Deixis and anaphora 1449

Lesley Stirling and Rodney Huddleston

18 Inflectional morphology and related matters 1565

Frank Palmer, Rodney Huddleston, and Geoffrey K. Pullum

19 Lexical word-formation 1621

Laurie Bauer and Rodney Huddleston

20 Punctuation 1723

The Term Paper on The Role of Culture in English Language Teaching

English Language is traditionally viewed as a code made up of words and a series of rules that connect them together. Language learning here, involves only vocabulary learning, and the rules for constructing ‘proper’ sentences. In most schools in Meghalaya, grammar is being taught at a very early age and students are expected to understand complex idiomatic phrases at the secondary level. ...

of general-purpose, present-day, international Standard English.

Synchronic versus diachronic description

A synchronic description of a language is a snapshot of it at one point in time, the

opposite of a diachronic or historical account. English has a rich history going back over

a millennium, but it is not the aim of this book to detail it. We include only a few notes

on historical points of interest that will assist the reader to understand the present state

of the language.

Of course, at any given moment English speakers with birthdates spread over about

a century are alive, so the idea of English as it is on one particular day is a ﬁction:

the English used today was learned by some speakers at the end of the twentieth century and by others near the beginning. But our practice will be to illustrate relevant

points mainly with examples of use of the language taken from prose produced since the

mid twentieth century. Examples from earlier periods are used only when particularly

apposite quotations are available for a point on which the language has not subsequently changed. Wherever grammatical change has clearly occurred, our aim will be

not to describe the evolutionary process but rather to describe the current state of the

language.

Description versus prescription

Our aim is to describe and not prescribe: we outline and illustrate the principles that

govern the construction of words and sentences in the present-day language without

recommending or condemning particular usage choices. Although this book may be

(and we certainly hope it will be) of use in helping the user decide how to phrase things,

it is not designed as a style guide or a usage manual. We report that sentences of some

types are now widely found and used, but we will not advise you to use them. We state

that sentences of some types are seldom encountered, or that usage manuals or language

columnists or language teachers recommend against them, or that some form of words

is normally found only in informal style or, conversely, is limited to rather formal style,

but we will not tell you that you should avoid them or otherwise make recommendations

3 pages, 1225 words

The Essay on English Language Words Slang Word

Acronyms, Idioms and Slang: the Evolution of the English Language. Although the English language is only 1500 years old, it has evolved a tan incredible rate: so much so, that, at first glance, the average person in America today would find most Shakespearean literature confusing without the aid of an Old-English dictionary or Cliff's Notes. Yet Shakespeare lived just 300 years ago! Some are ...

about how you should speak or write. Rather, this book offers a description of the context

common to all such decisions: the linguistic system itself.

P1 : HEF

CU097 -01

CU097 -Huddleston.cls

February 7 , 2002

21 :2

1 The aim of this book

General-purpose versus special-purpose

We exclude from consideration what we refer to as special-purpose varieties of the

language. Newspaper headlines, road signs, notices, and the like have their own special

styles of abbreviation (Man bites dog, arrested; EXIT ONLY THIS LANE), and we do not

provide a full treatment of the possibilities. Likewise, we do not provide a description

of any special notations (chemical formulae, telephone numbers, email addresses) or of

the special language found in poetry, heraldic descriptions, scientiﬁc works, chemical

compound naming, computer jargon, mathematical proofs, etc. To some small extent

there may be idiosyncratic grammatical patterns found in such areas, but we generally

set them aside, avoiding complicated digressions about usages found within only a very

narrow range of discourse.

Present-day English versus earlier stages

Modern English is generally deﬁned by historians of English to be the English used from

1776 onwards. The recent part of the latter period (say, since the Second World War)

can be called Present-day English. Linguistic changes have occurred in the grammar

of English during the Modern English period, and even during the last half-century.

Our central aim is to describe Present-day English in its standard form. This means,

for example, that we treat the pronoun system as not containing a contrast between

familiar and respectful 2 nd person pronouns: the contrast between thou and you has

been lost, and we do not mention thou in this grammar. Of course, this does not mean

that people who use thou (actors in period plays, people addressing God in prayers, or

Quakers who have retained the older usage) are making a mistake; but they are not using

the general-purpose standard Present-day English described in this book.

Grammar versus other components

3 pages, 1217 words

English Grammar Essay

English Grammar Essay In my essay I will investigate the issue of using adjectives and adverbs in English grammar. This issue is of great importance for me and requires my attention because I confuse the forms of adjectives and adverbs very often in my everyday speech. Thus, first, I will define the meaning of the main terms: an adjective, an adverb; and the terms surrounding them: a noun, a ...

A grammar of a language describes the principles or rules governing the form and

meaning of words, phrases, clauses, and sentences. As such, it interacts with other components of a complete description: the phonology (covering the sound system), the

graphology (the writing system: spelling and punctuation), the dictionary or lexicon,

and the semantics.

Phonology and graphology do not receive attention in their own right here, but both

have to be treated explicitly in the course of our description of inﬂection in Ch. 18

(we introduce the concepts that we will draw on in §3 of this chapter), and Ch. 20 deals

with one aspect of the writing system in providing an outline account of the important

system of punctuation.

A lexicon for a language deals with the vocabulary: it brings together information

about the pronunciation, spelling, meaning, and grammatical properties of the lexical

items – the words, and the items with special meanings that consist of more than one

word, the idioms.

The study of conventional linguistic meaning is known as semantics. We take this to

cut across the division between grammar and lexicon. That is, we distinguish between

lexical semantics, which dictionaries cover, and grammatical semantics. Our account

of grammatical meaning will be quite informal, but will distinguish between semantics

(dealing with the meaning of sentences or words as determined by the language system

itself) and pragmatics (which has to do with the use and interpretation of sentences

P1 : HEF

CU097 -01

CU097 -Huddleston.cls

February 7 , 2002

21 :2

Chapter 1 Preliminaries

as used in particular contexts); an introduction to these and other concepts used in

describing meaning is given in §5 of this chapter.

A grammar itself is divisible into two components, syntax and morphology. Syntax

is concerned with the way words combine to form phrases, clauses, and sentences, while

morphology deals with the formation of words. This division gives special prominence

to the word, a unit which is also of major importance in the lexicon, the phonology and

the graphology.

16 pages, 7702 words

The Term Paper on Language Acquisition Child Words Months

CONTENT Introduction... 3 Main body 1. Language acquisition... 42.The stages of language acquisition... 52. 1. The pre linguistic stage... 72. 2.Babbling... 72. 3. One-word utterances... 92. 4.Two-word utterances... 102. 5. Telegraphic speech... 132. 6.Language learning during the pre-school period... 163. The critical period... 174. The summary of behaviour's to expect of children with normally ...

Standard versus non-standard

Perhaps the most subtle concept we have to rely on is the one that picks out the particular variety of Present-day English we describe, which we call Standard English. Brieﬂy

(for we will return to the topic below), we are describing the kind of English that is

widely accepted in the countries of the world where English is the language of government, education, broadcasting, news publishing, entertainment, and other public

discourse.

In a large number of countries (now running into scores), including some where

most of the people have other languages as their ﬁrst language, English is used for most

printed books, magazines, newspapers, and public notices; for most radio and television broadcasting; for many or most ﬁlm scripts, plays, poetry, and other literary art;

for speeches, lectures, political addresses, proclamations, ofﬁcial ceremonies, advertisements, and other general announcements. In these countries there is a high degree of

consensus about the appropriate variety of English to use. The consensus is conﬁrmed

by the decisions of broadcasting authorities about the kind of English that will be used

for public information announcements, newscasts, commentaries to broadcasts of national events such as state funerals, and so on. It is conﬁrmed by the writing found in

magazines, newspapers, novels, and non-ﬁction books; by the editing and correcting

that is done by the publishers of these; and by the way writers for the most part accept

such editing and correcting of their work.

This is not to say that controversy cannot arise about points of grammar or usage.

There is much dispute, and that is precisely the subject matter for prescriptive usage manuals. Nonetheless, the controversy about particular points stands out against a backdrop

of remarkably widespread agreement about how sentences should be constructed for

such purposes as publication, political communication, or government broadcasting.

This widespread agreement deﬁnes what we are calling Standard English.

National versus international

Finally, we note that this book is not intended to promote any particular country’s

variety of Standard English as a norm; it is to apply internationally. English is the

single most important language in the world, being the ofﬁcial or de facto language

of the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand,

South Africa, and dozens of others, and being the lingua franca of the Internet. Many

varieties of English are spoken around the world – from lectures in graduate schools

in Holland to parliamentary proceedings in Papua New Guinea – but interestingly

the vast majority of the variation lies in pronunciation and vocabulary. The number of differences in grammar between different varieties of Standard English is very

P1 : HEF

CU097 -01

CU097 -Huddleston.cls

February 7 , 2002

21 :2

2 Prescriptivism, tradition, and justification of grammars

small indeed relative to the full range of syntactic constructions and morphological

word-forms.

Nevertheless, there undoubtedly are differences of this kind that need to be noted.

For example, the use of the verb do following an auxiliary verb, as in % I’m not sure that

I’ll go, but I may do is not found in American English, and conversely the past participle

verb-form gotten, as in % I’ve just gotten a new car, is distinctively American. We use the

symbol ‘% ’ to mark constructions or forms that are restricted to some dialect or dialects

in this way.

The regional dialects of Standard English in the world today can be divided into

two large families with regional and historical afﬁnities. One contains standard educated Southern British English, henceforth abbreviated BrE, together with a variety of

related dialects, including most of the varieties of English in Great Britain, Australia,

New Zealand, South Africa, and most other places in the British Commonwealth. The

second dialect family we will refer to as American English, henceforth AmE – it contains

the dialects of the United States, Canada, and associated territories, from Hawaii and

Alaska to eastern Canada.

2 Prescriptivism, tradition, and the justification of grammars

The topic of prescriptivism and its relation to the long tradition of English grammatical

scholarship needs some further discussion if the basis of our work, and its relation to

other contributions to the ﬁeld, is to be properly understood. It relates to the issue of how

the statements of a grammar are justiﬁed: what the support for a claimed grammatical

statement might be.

2.1 Prescriptive and descriptive approaches: goals and coverage

The distinction between the prescriptive and descriptive approaches to grammar is

often explained by saying that prescriptivists want to tell you how you ought to speak

and write, while descriptivists want to tell you how people actually do speak and write.

This does bring out the major difference between the two approaches: it is a difference

in goals. However, it is something of an oversimpliﬁcation, because writing a descriptive

grammar in practice involves a fair amount of idealisation: we need to abstract away

from the errors that people make, especially in speech (this point is taken up again

in §3 below).

In addition, it glosses over some signiﬁcant differences between the kinds

of works prescriptivists and descriptivists characteristically produce.

Differences in content

The basic difference in goals between prescriptive and descriptive works goes hand in

hand with a striking difference in topics treated. The subject matters overlap, but many

topics dealt with by prescriptive works ﬁnd no place in a descriptive grammar, and

some topics that must be treated in a descriptive grammar are universally ignored by

prescriptive works.

The advice of prescriptivists is supplied in works of a type we will refer to as usage

manuals. They are almost invariably arranged in the style of a dictionary, containing an

P1 : HEF

CU097 -01

CU097 -Huddleston.cls

February 7 , 2002

21 :2

Chapter 1 Preliminaries

alphabetically arranged series of entries on topics where the issue of what is correct or

acceptable is not altogether straightforward. In the ﬁrst few pages of one usage manual

we ﬁnd entries on abacus (should the plural be abaci ?), abbreviations (which ones are

acceptable in formal writing?), abdomen (is the stress on the second syllable or the ﬁrst?),

abduction (how does it differ in meaning from kidnapping ?), and so on. These points

concern inﬂection, formal writing, pronunciation, and meaning, respectively, and on

all of them a degree of variation and occasional uncertainty is encountered even among

expert users of English. Not all of them would belong in a grammatical description.

For example, our grammar does cover the plural of abacus (Ch. 18 , §4.1 .6), but it does

not list abbreviations, or phonological topics like the placement of stress in English

words, or lexical semantic topics like the distinction between abduction and kidnapping.

These we take to be in the province of lexicon – matters for a dictionary rather than

a grammar.

Usage manuals also give a great deal of attention to matters of style and effective expression that lie beyond the range of grammar as we understand it. Thus one prescriptive

usage dictionary warns that explore every avenue is a tired cliche (and adds that it makes

little sense, since exploration suggests a more challenging environment than an avenue);

that the phrase in this day and age ‘should be avoided at all costs’; that circling round is

tautologous (one can only circle by going round) and thus should not be used; and so

on. Whether or not one thinks these are good pieces of advice, we do not take them to

fall within the realm of grammar. A sentence like In this day and age one must circle round

and explore every avenue may be loaded with careworn verbiage, or it may even be arrant

nonsense, but there is absolutely nothing grammatically wrong with it.

There are also topics in a descriptive grammar that are uniformly ignored by prescriptivists. These include the most salient and well-known principles of syntax. Prescriptive

works tend to be highly selective, dealing only with points on which people make mistakes (or what are commonly thought to be mistakes).

They would never supply, for

example, the grammatically important information that determinatives like the and a

precede the noun they are associated with (the house, not ∗house the),1 or that modal

auxiliaries like can and must are disallowed in inﬁnitival clauses (∗I’d like to can swim is

ungrammatical), or that in subordinate interrogative clauses the interrogative element

comes at the front (so we get She asked what we needed, not ∗She asked we needed what).

Native speakers never get these things wrong, so no advice is needed.

2.2 Disagreement between descriptivist and prescriptivist work

Although descriptive grammars and prescriptive usage manuals differ in the range of

topics they treat, there is no reason in principle why they should not agree on what

they say about the topics they both treat. The fact they do not is interesting. There are

several reasons for the lack of agreement. We deal with three of them here: (a) the basis in

personal taste of some prescriptivist writers’ judgements; (b) the confusion of informality

with ungrammaticality; and (c) certain invalid arguments sometimes appealed to by

prescriptivists. These are extraneous features of prescriptive writing about language

rather than inherent ones, and all three of them are less prevalent now than they were

Throughout this book we use an asterisk to indicate that what follows is ungrammatical.

P1 : HEF

CU097 -01

CU097 -Huddleston.cls

February 7 , 2002

21 :2

2.2 Disagreement – descriptivist vs prescriptivist

in the past. But older prescriptive works have exempliﬁed them, and a few still do; their

inﬂuence lingers on in the English-speaking educational world.

(a) Taste tyranny

Some prescriptivist works present rules that have no basis in the way the language is

actually used by the majority of its native speakers, and are not even claimed to have any

such basis – as though the manual-writer’s own judgements of taste took precedence

over those of any other speaker of the language. They expect all speakers to agree with

their judgements, no matter what the facts of language use might show.

For example, one usage manual, discussing why it is (supposedly) incorrect to say You

need a driving instructor who you have conﬁdence in, states that ‘The accusative whom is

necessary with the preposition in, though whom is a word strangely shunned by most

English people.’ We take the implication to be that English people should not shun this

word, since the writer (who is English) does not. But we are inclined to ask what grounds

there could be for saying that whom is ‘necessary’ if most English people (or speakers of

the English language) would avoid it.

The same book objects to centre (a )round, calling it incorrect, although ‘probably

more frequently used than the correct centre on’. Again, we wonder how centre (a )round

can be determined to be incorrect in English if it is indeed more commonly used by

English speakers than what is allegedly correct. The boundary would appear to have

been drawn in the wrong place.

Prescriptive works instantiating this kind of aesthetic authoritarianism provide no

answer to such obvious questions. They simply assert that grammar dictates things, without supporting their claim from evidence. The basis for the recommendations offered

appears to lie in the writer’s taste: the writer quoted above simply does not like to see

who used where it is understood as the object of a preposition, and personally hates the

expression centre around. What is going on here is a universalising of one person’s taste,

a demand that everyone should agree with it and conform to it.

The descriptivist view would be that when most speakers use a form that our grammar

says is incorrect, there is at least a prima facie case that it is the grammar that is wrong,

not the speakers. And indeed, even in the work just quoted we ﬁnd the remark that

‘Alright is common, and may in time become normal’ , an acknowledgement that the

language may change over time, and what begins as an isolated variant on a pattern

may eventually become the new pattern. The descriptive grammarian will always adopt

a stance of something more like this sort, thus making evidence relevant to the matter at

hand. If what is involved were a matter of taste, all evidence would be beside the point.

But under the descriptive viewpoint, grammar is not a matter of taste, nor of aesthetics.

This is not to say that the expression of personal aesthetic judgements is without

utility. The writer of a book on usage might be someone famous for brilliant use of

the language, someone eminently worthy of being followed in matters of taste and

literary style. It might be very useful to have a compendium of such a person’s preferences and recommendations, and very sensible for a less expert writer to follow the

recommendations of an acknowledged master of the writer’s craft (assuming such recommendations do reliably accord with the master’s practice).

All we are pointing out is

that where the author of an authoritarian usage manual departs from recommendations

that agree with the way most people use the language, prescriptivist and descriptivist

P1 : HEF

CU097 -01

CU097 -Huddleston.cls

February 7 , 2002

21 :2

Chapter 1 Preliminaries

accounts will necessarily disagree. The authoritarian prescriptivist whose recommendations are out of step with the usage of others is at liberty to declare that they are

in error and should change their ways; the descriptivist under the same circumstances

will assume that it is precisely the constant features in the usage of the overwhelming

majority that deﬁne what is grammatical in the contemporary language, and will judge

the prescriptivist to be expressing an idiosyncratic opinion concerning how the language

ought to be.

(b) Confusing informal style with ungrammaticality

It has been a common assumption of prescriptivists that only formal style is grammatically correct. The quotation about whom given above is representative of this view, for

whom can be a marker of relatively formal style, being commonly replaced by who in

informal style (see Ch. 5 , §16.2 .3 , for a detailed account of the use of these two forms).

There are two related points to be made here. The ﬁrst is that it is important to distinguish

between the two contrasts illustrated in the following pairs:

[1 ]

i a. It is clear whom they had in mind.

ii a. Kim and I saw the accident.

b. It’s clear who they had in mind.

b. ! Kim and me saw the accident.

In [i], both versions belong to Standard English, with [a] somewhat formal, and [b]

neutral or slightly informal. There is no difference in grammaticality. But in [ii], the

[a] version is standard, the [b] version non-standard; we use the ‘! ’ symbol to mark

a construction or form as ungrammatical in Standard English but grammatical in a

non-standard dialect. Construction [iib] will be heard in the speech of speakers of dialects that have a different rule for case inﬂection of pronouns: they use the accusative

forms (me, him, her, us, them) whenever the pronoun is coordinated. Standard English

does not.

A common view in the prescriptivist tradition is that uses of who like [1 ib] are not

grammatically correct but are nevertheless ‘sanctioned by usage’. For example, Fowler,

one of the most inﬂuential prescriptivists of the twentieth century, wrote: ‘The interrogative who is often used in talk where grammar demands whom, as in Who did

you hear that from? No further defence than “colloquial” is needed for this.’ This implies a dichotomy between ‘talk’ and ‘grammar’ that we reject. The standard language

embraces a range of styles, from formal through neutral to informal. A satisfactory

grammar must describe them all. It is not that formal style keeps to the rules and informal style departs from them; rather, formal and informal styles have partially different

rules.

Prescriptive grammarians have frequently backed up their pronouncements with appeals

to entirely extraneous considerations. Some older prescriptive grammars, for example,

give evidence of relying on rules that would be better suited to the description of classical

languages like Latin than to Present-day English. Consider, for example, the difference

between the uses of accusative and nominative forms of the personal pronouns seen in:

[2 ]

a. It is I.

b. It’s me.

With who and whom in [1 i] we saw a construction where an accusative form was associated with relatively formal style. In [2 ], however, it is the sentence with the nominative

P1 : HEF

CU097 -01

CU097 -Huddleston.cls

February 7 , 2002

21 :2

2.2 Disagreement – descriptivist vs prescriptivist

form I that belongs to (very) formal style, while accusative me is neutral or informal

(again, see Ch. 5 , §16.2 .1 for a fuller description of the facts).

Confusing informality with

ungrammaticality again, a strong prescriptivist tradition says that only [2 a] is grammatical. The accusative me is claimed to be the case of the direct object, as in It hurt me, but

in [2 ] the noun phrase after the verb is a predicative complement. In Latin, predicative

complements take nominative, the same case as the subject. An assumption is being

made that English grammar too requires nominative case for predicative complements.

Use of the accusative me is regarded as a departure from the rules of grammar.

The mistake here, of course, is to assume that what holds in Latin grammar has to

hold for English. English grammar differs on innumerable points from Latin grammar; there is no reason in principle why the assignment of case to predicative complements should not be one of them. After all, English is very different from Latin with

respect to case: the nominative–accusative contrast applies to only a handful of pronouns (rather than to the full class of nouns, as in Latin).

The right way to describe

the present situation in Standard English (unlike Latin) is that with the pronouns that

have a nominative–accusative case distinction, the choice between the cases for a predicative complement noun phrase varies according to the style level: the nominative is

noticeably formal, the accusative is more or less neutral and always used in informal

contexts.

Another kind of illegitimate argument is based on analogy between one area of grammar and another. Consider yet another construction where there is variation between

nominative and accusative forms of pronouns:

[3 ]

a. They invited me to lunch.

b. % They invited my partner and I to lunch.

The ‘% ’ symbol is again used to mark the [b] example as typically used by some speakers

of Standard English but not others, though this time it is not a matter of regional

variation. The status of the construction in [b] differs from that of It’s me, which is

undisputedly normal in informal use, and from that of !Me and Kim saw her leave,

which is unquestionably non-standard. What is different is that examples like [b] are

regularly used by a signiﬁcant proportion of speakers of Standard English, and not

generally thought by ordinary speakers to be non-standard; they pass unnoticed in

broadcast speech all the time.

Prescriptivists, however, condemn the use illustrated by [3 b], insisting that the ‘correct’ form is They invited my partner and me to lunch. And here again they seek to justify

their claim that [3 b] is ungrammatical by an implicit analogy, this time with other situations found in English, such as the example seen in [a]. In [a] the pronoun functions

by itself as direct object of the verb and invariably appears in accusative case. What is

different in [b] is that the direct object of the verb has the form of a coordination, not

a single pronoun. Prescriptivists commonly take it for granted that this difference is

irrelevant to case assignment. They argue that because we have an accusative in [a] we

should also have an accusative in [b], so the nominative I is ungrammatical.

But why should we simply assume that the grammatical rules for case assignment

cannot differentiate between a coordinated and a non-coordinated pronoun? As it happens, there is another place in English grammar where the rules are sensitive to this

distinction – for virtually all speakers, not just some of them:

[4 ]

a. I don’t know if you’re eligible.

b. ∗ I don’t know if she and you’re eligible.

P1 : HEF

CU097 -01

CU097 -Huddleston.cls

February 7 , 2002

21 :2

Chapter 1 Preliminaries

The sequence you are can be reduced to you’re in [a], where you is subject, but not

in [b], where the subject has the form of a coordination of pronouns. This shows us

not only that a rule of English could apply differently to pronouns and coordinated

pronouns, but that one rule actually does. If that is so, then a rule could likewise distinguish between [3 a] and [3 b]. The argument from analogy is illegitimate. Whether

[3 b] is treated as correct Standard English or not (a matter that we take up in Ch. 5 ,

§16.2 .2 ), it cannot be successfully argued to be incorrect simply by virtue of the analogy

with [3 a].

The claim that [1 ib] (It’s clear who they had in mind) is ungrammatical is supported

by the same kind of analogical reasoning. In They had me in mind, we have accusative

me, so it is assumed that the grammar likewise requires accusative whom. The assumption here is that the rules of case assignment are not sensitive to the difference in the

position of the pronoun (after the verb for me, at the beginning of the clause for who),

or to the difference between interrogative and personal pronouns. There is, however,

no basis for assuming that the rules of grammar cannot make reference to such differences: the grammar of English could assign case to clause-initial and non-clauseinitial pronouns, or to interrogative and non-interrogative pronouns, in slightly different

ways.2

We should stress that not all prescriptive grammarians exhibit the shortcomings we

have just catalogued – universalising taste judgements, confusing informality with

ungrammaticality, citing spurious external justiﬁcations, and arguing from spurious

analogies. There are usage manuals that are accurate in their understanding of the facts,

clear-sighted in their attitudes towards usage trends, and useful in their recommendations; such books can be an enormous help to a writer. But the good prescriptive manuals

respect a crucial tenet: that their criterion should always be the use of the standard

language by its native speakers.

As we have said, to some extent good usage manuals go far beyond grammar into

style, rhetoric, and communication, giving advice about which expressions are over´

used cliches, or fail to make their intended point, or are unintentionally ambiguous, or

perpetuate an unfortunate malapropism, or any of a large number of other matters that

lie beyond the scope of this book. But when it comes to points of grammar, the only

legitimate basis for an absolute judgement of incorrectness in a usage manual is that

what is being rejected is not in the standard language.

The aspects of some prescriptivist works that we have discussed illustrate ways in

which those works let their users down. Where being ungrammatical is confused with

merely being informal, there is a danger that the student of English will not be taught how

to speak in a normal informal way, but will sound stilted and unnatural, like an inexpert

reader reading something out from a book. And where analogies are used uncritically to

predict grammatical properties, or Latin principles are taken to guarantee correct use of

English, the user is simply being misled.

A further type of invalid argument that falls under the present heading confuses grammar with logic. This is

illustrated in the remarkably widespread but completely fallacious claim that non-standard ! I didn’t see nobody

is intrinsically inferior to standard I didn’t see anybody because the two negatives cancel each other out. We

discuss this issue in Ch. 9, §6.2 .

P1 : HEF

CU097 -01

CU097 -Huddleston.cls

February 7 , 2002

21 :2

3 Speech and writing

The stipulations of incorrectness that will be genuinely useful to the student are

those about what is actually not found in the standard language, particularly with respect to features widely recognised as characteristic of some deﬁnitely non-standard

dialect. And in that case evidence from use of Standard English by the people who

speak it and write it every day will show that it is not regularly used, which means

prescriptive and descriptive accounts will not be in conﬂict, for evidence from use of

the language is exactly what is relied upon by descriptive grammars such as we present

here.

The evidence we use comes from several sources: our own intuitions as native speakers

of the language; the reactions of other native speakers we consult when we are in doubt;

data from computer corpora (machine-readable bodies of naturally occurring text),3

and data presented in dictionaries and other scholarly work on grammar. We alternate

between the different sources and cross-check them against each other, since intuitions

can be misleading and texts can contain errors. Issues of interpretation often arise.

But always, under the descriptive approach, claims about grammar will depend upon

evidence.

3 Speech and writing

There are signiﬁcant and interesting differences between spoken and written language,

but we do not regard written English as a different language from spoken English. In

general, we aim to describe both the written standard variety that is encountered in

contemporary newspapers, magazines, and books and the spoken standard variety that

is heard on radio and television programmes in English-speaking countries.

‘Speaker’ and ‘utterance’ as medium-neutral terms

Most of what we say will apply equally to the spoken and written varieties of the language.

As there is no non-technical term covering both one who utters a sentence in speech

and one who writes a sentence, we will follow the widespread practice in linguistics

of extending the ordinary sense of ‘speaker’ so as to subsume ‘writer’ – a practice that

reﬂects the fact that speech is in important respects more basic than writing.4 We likewise

take ‘utterance’ to be neutral between the mediums, so that we will refer to both spoken

and written utterances.

Practical bias towards written English

Despite our neutrality between speech and writing in principle, there are at least three

reasons why the reader may perceive something of a bias in this work towards data from

The computer corpora that we have made use of are the Brown corpus of a million words of American English;

the London/Oslo/Bergen (LOB) corpus of British English; the Australian Corpus of English (ACE); and the

Wall Street Journal corpus distributed by the Association for Computational Linguistics. The British National

Corpus (BNC) was only released to scholars working outside the UK after the book was in ﬁnal draft. We have

also drawn on a variety of other sources, including collections of our own from sources such as magazines,

newspapers, plays, books, and ﬁlm scripts.

Since our discussion of sentences will very often make reference to the way they are used we will have very

frequent occasion to talk of speakers, and in order to avoid repeatedly using the term ‘speaker’ we will often

simply use the 1 st person pronoun I . Given that the book has joint authorship this pronoun could not be used

in reference to any speciﬁc person, and hence is available as a convenient variant of ‘the speaker’.

P1 : HEF

CU097 -01

CU097 -Huddleston.cls

February 7 , 2002

21 :2

Chapter 1 Preliminaries

written English. To the extent that it is present, it stems from practical considerations

rather than matters of principle. We will discuss here the three factors motivating the

choices we have made.

Citation of forms and examples

First, we normally follow the usual practice in grammars of citing words or sentences

in their written form. This is mainly a matter of practical convenience: it is much more

straightforward typographically, and more widely accessible to readers, to supply examples in this form. In certain cases – as, for example, in describing the inﬂectional forms

of verbs and nouns in Ch. 18 – it is necessary to indicate the pronunciation, and for this

purpose we use the system of transcription described in §3 .1 .2 below. Representations

in written form are given in italics, while phonological representations are enclosed in

obliques.

Accessibility of print sources

Second, we make frequent use of genuinely attested examples (often shortened or otherwise modiﬁed in ways not relevant to the point at issue), and it is signiﬁcantly easier to

obtain access to suitable large collections, or corpora, of written data in a conveniently

archived and readily searchable form than it is for speech.

Error rates in speech

Third, and most importantly, it must be acknowledged that the error content of spoken

material is higher than that of written material. Those who have listened to tape recordings of spontaneous conversation are likely to have been struck by the high incidence of

hesitation noises, false starts, self-corrections, repetitions, and other dysﬂuencies found

in the speech of many people. It is not hard to see why speech contains a higher number

of errors than writing. The rapid production of speech (quite often several words per

second) leaves little time for reﬂection on construction choices or planning of sentence

structure, so that at normal conversational pace slip-ups of the kind mentioned are very

common. As a result, what speakers actually come out with reﬂects only imperfectly the

system that deﬁnes the spoken version of the language. Hardly noticed by the listener,

and often compensated for by virtually unconscious repair strategies on the part of the

speaker, these sporadic interruptions and imperfections in speech production are inherently outside the purview of the grammarian (the discipline of psycholinguistics studies

them in order to learn about the planning, production, and perception of speech).

They

therefore have to be screened out through judicious decision-making by a skilled native speaker of the language before grammatical description is attempted. The original

speaker is not always available for the tedious editing task, and so someone else has to

interpret the transcript and remove the apparent errors, which means that misunderstandings can result (word sequences that were actually due to slips might be wrongly

taken to represent grammatical facts).

Written English has the advantage that its slow rate of composition has generally

allowed time and opportunity for nearly all these slips and failures of execution to be

screened out by the actual author of the sentence. This provides a practical reason for

us to show a preference for it when selecting illustrative examples: we have very good

reason to believe that what ultimately gets printed corresponds fairly closely to what the

writer intended to say.

P1 : HEF

CU097 -01

CU097 -Huddleston.cls

February 7 , 2002

21 :2

3.1 The representation of English pronunciation

The nature of the written medium and the slower sentence-planning environment

permits the construction of longer sentences than typically occur in speech, but we take

this to be a matter of degree, not a matter of written English instantiating new possibilities

that are completely absent from the spoken language. The basic point of most written

material is that people who are ordinary native speakers of the language should read it

and understand it, so the pressure will always be in the direction of keeping it fairly close

to the language in which (ignoring the speech errors referred to above) ordinary people

talk to each other.

Thus while we acknowledge a tendency for the exempliﬁcation in this grammar to be

biased towards written English, we assume that the goal of providing a description

that is neutral between spoken and written English is not an unreasonable one. Sharp

divergences between the syntax of speech and the syntax of writing, as opposed to

differences that exist between styles within either the spoken or the written language,

are rare to the point of non-existence.

3.1 The representation of English pronunciation

This section provides an introduction to the system of representation we use in this

book in those cases where it is necessary to indicate the pronunciation of words or word

sequences. Developing a system that will be readily usable by non-specialists is by no

means a trivial enterprise; English has a remarkably complex vowel system compared to

most other languages, and one of the most complex patterns of ﬁt between sound and

spelling found in any language. Taken together, these facts raise some signiﬁcant and

unavoidable difﬁculties even if only one variety of English is under consideration. But an

additional problem is that English is a global language with something like 400 million

native speakers pronouncing the language in many different ways: pronunciation differs

across the world more than any other aspect of the language.

3.1.1 Rhotic and non-rhotic accents

We will use the term accent for varieties of a language distinguished by pronunciation,

opposing it to dialect, which applies to varieties distinguished by grammar or vocabulary.

The most important accent distinction in English concerns the sound we represent as

/r/. Most speakers in the BrE family of dialects have a non-rhotic accent: here /r/ occurs

in pre-vocalic position, i.e. when immediately preceding a vowel, as in run or area, but

not in post-vocalic position, after the vowel of a syllable. For example, in a non-rhotic

accent there is no /r/ in any of the words in [1 ] (as pronounced in isolation):

[1 ]

i a. mar, bear, ﬂoor, stir, actor

ii a. hard, torque, term, burn

b. care, hire, bore, sure, cure

b. hammered

The words in [i] all end in a vowel sound, while those in [ii] end in a vowel followed by

just one consonant sound; note that the letter e at the end of the words in [ib] and of

torque in [iia], and also that before the d in [iib] are ‘silent’ – i.e. there is no vowel in this

position in the spoken form. In many of the non-rhotic accents such pairs of words as

mar and ma, ﬂoor and ﬂaw, or torque and talk are pronounced the same. A non-rhotic

accent is thus one which lacks post-vocalic /r/.

P1 : HEF

CU097 -01

CU097 -Huddleston.cls

February 7 , 2002

21 :2

Chapter 1 Preliminaries

Most speakers in the AmE family of dialects, by contrast, have a rhotic accent, where

there is no such restriction on the distribution of /r/: all the words in [1 ] are pronounced

with an /r/ sound after the (ﬁnal) vowel, or (in the case of stir and term) with a rhotacised

(‘r -coloured’) vowel sound, a coalescence of /r/ with the vowel.5

The English spelling system reﬂects the pronunciation of rhotic accents: in non-rhotic

accents post-vocalic /r/ has been lost as a result of a historical change that took place

after the writing system became standardised.

Linking and intrusive /r/

A further difference between non-rhotic and rhotic accents is seen in the pronunciation

of such words and word sequences as those given in [2 ], where we use the symbol ‘·’

to mark grammatical boundaries within a word (in these examples, between base and

sufﬁx):

[2 ]

i a. marr·ing, sur·est, soar·ing

ii a. saw·ing, thaw·ing

b. the fear of death

b. the idea of death

In non-rhotic accents the words in [ia] are all pronounced with /r/: the dropping of

post-vocalic /r/ in the words mar, sure, soar does not apply here because the addition of

a sufﬁx beginning with a vowel makes the /r/ at the end of the base pre-vocalic. Similarly

the word sequence [ib] is usually pronounced with an /r/ at the end of fear because the

initial vowel of the next word makes it pre-vocalic.

The /r/ in pronunciations of [2 i] in non-rhotic accents is called a linking /r/. Within

a word, as in [ia], linking /r/ is obligatory; in word boundary position, as in [ib], the

/r/ is optional though strongly preferred in most styles of speech. In [ii], where there is

no r in the spelling, an /r/ pronounced at the end of the bases saw· and thaw· or of the

word idea is called an intrusive /r/. Word-boundary intrusive /r/ in the pronunciation

of sequences like [iib] is very common; word-internal intrusive /r/ in words like those in

[iia] is much less common and quite widely disapproved of.

Rhotic accents do not have intrusive /r/ at all: they maintain a sharp distinction

between [2 i] and [ii], with /r/ appearing only in the former. And although they pronounce

/r/ in the forms in [i], this is not linking /r/, since the bases mar, sure, soar, and fear have

/r/ in these accents even when not followed by a vowel.

3.1.2 An accent-neutral phonological representation

Where we need to give pronunciations of words or larger expressions, it would be inconsistent with our goals to conﬁne ourselves to one accent, but to attempt a complete listing

of the pronunciations in each signiﬁcant regional or other variety would be tedious. We

therefore present here a unitary way of representing pronunciations for major BrE and

AmE accents, whether rhotic or non-rhotic. For this purpose it is necessary to indicate

more distinctions than would be needed in a system constructed for any one accent. In

The correlation between the rhotic vs non-rhotic accent distinction and that between the BrE and AmE

family of dialects is not perfect. Ireland, Scotland, the west of England, and some English-speaking Caribbean

countries have rhotic accents and yet belong to the BrE family, and, conversely, there are various non-rhotic

accents within the United States, including some working-class northeastern varieties and some upper-class

southeastern varieties. The term ‘rhotic’ derives from the Greek name of the letter r .

P1 : HEF

CU097 -01

CU097 -Huddleston.cls

February 7 , 2002

21 :2

3.1.2 An accent-neutral phonological representation

particular, since it cannot be determined from the pronunciation in a non-rhotic accent

where post-vocalic /r/ would occur in a rhotic one (for example, southern British English

has /t k/ for both torque and talk), post-vocalic /r/ will have to be shown in some way

even though it is not pronounced in the non-rhotic accents. Other differences have to

be dealt with similarly.

The system we adopt is set out in [3 ], with illustrative examples in which the letter or

letter sequence that symbolises the sound in question is underlined. Some notes on the

system follow below.

[3 ]

short vowels

odd, lot, lost

æ gas, fat, pan

gut, much, done

alone, potato, stringent, sofa

lunar, driver, actor

long vowels

spa, calm, father

are, arm, spar

err, bird, work, fur

i eel, sea, fiend, dream, machine

diphthongs

aυ owl, mouth, plough

ei aim, day, eight, grey

ai I, right, ﬂy, guy

i idea

i r ear, fear, pier, mere

triphthongs

ai r ire, pyre, choir

consonants

b boy, sobbing

d day, address

d judge, giant, germ

ð this, although, bathe

f food, phonetics, if, off, rough

g good, ghost, guide

h hood

j yes, fjord

k cat, chorus, kiss, brick, Iraqi

l lie, all

m me, thumb, damn

n nigh, knife, gnaw, pneumatic

diacritics

n syllabic /n/ (likewise for /l/, etc.)

get, fell, friend, endeavour

happy, pennies, maybe

kit, build, women

wanted, luggage, buses

look, good, put

awe, dawn, caught, fall

or, corn, warn

u ooze, blue, prune, brew, through

oυ

υr

aυ

air, bare, pear

owe, go, dough, toe, goat

oil, boy

poor, sure, dour

our

sing, drink, dinghy

thigh

pie

rye, wrist

see, kiss, city, psychology

show, sure, charade, schmuck

tall, pterodactyl

chin, watch

view, love, of

wet

zeal, peas

measure, evasion, beige, rouge

stressed syllable (a loof, sofa)

P1 : HEF

CU097 -01

CU097 -Huddleston.cls

February 7 , 2002

21 :2

Chapter 1 Preliminaries

Notes on the transcription system

Post-vocalic /r/

This is represented by a superscript /r /. In rhotic AmE, it is pronounced as a separate /r/ consonant or coalesces with the preceding sound to give a rhotacised vowel.

In non-rhotic BrE it is not pronounced at all – though, as we noted above, a wordﬁnal /r / will typically be pronounced in connected speech as a pre-vocalic linking /r/

when followed by a word beginning with a vowel. Pre-vocalic /r/ corresponds to an r

in the spelling. We do not include intrusive /r/ in our representations, since it is predictably present (between a low vowel or / / and a following vowel) in those accents that

have it.

/i/, / /, and /i/

The unstressed vowel in the second syllable of orange, wanted, wishes, lozenge, etc., is a

signiﬁcant difﬁculty for an accent-neutral transcription. In BrE it is typically identical

with the vowel of kit, which we represent as /i/; in most AmE and some Australian

varieties it is usually identical with the second vowel of sofa, / /. Many of its occurrences

are in the inﬂectional endings; but there is one inﬂectional sufﬁx in English that contains

/i/ in virtually all accents, namely ·ing, and there are sufﬁxes containing a vowel that is

/ / in all accents (e.g. ·en in written).

Hence we need a third symbol for the vowel that

varies between accents. We use /i/. This has been used by American phonologists as a

phonetic symbol for a vowel slightly less front than /i/ and slightly higher than / /, so it

is a good phonetic compromise, and visually suggests the /i/ of those BrE accents that

have a minimal contrast between counted / kaυntid/ and countered / kaυnt d/. It should

be kept in mind, however, that it is used here not with an exact phonetic value but rather

as a cover symbol for either /i/ or / / according to accent.

/ / versus / /

For the vowel of pot, rock, not, etc., we use / /. Most varieties of AmE never have / /

phonetically in any context, so the American pronunciation can be derived simply by

replacing our / / by / / everywhere. Hence there is no possibility of ambiguity.

/oυ/ versus / υ/

For the vowel of grow, go, dough, etc., we write /oυ/, in which the ‘o’ makes the phonological representation closer to the spelling; for most BrE speakers / υ/ would be a

phonetically more appropriate representation.

/ / versus / /

BrE has distinct vowels in caught and calm: we represent them as / / and / / respectively.

AmE standardly has the same vowel here, so for AmE the transcription / / should be

read as / /.

/æ/ versus / /

Both BrE and AmE have distinct vowels in fat, /fæt/, and calm, /k m/, but there are

a considerable number of words where most BrE accents have / / while AmE (but

also some accents within the BrE family) has /æ/. Very few of these arise in our examples, however, so instead of introducing a third symbol we give separate BrE and AmE

representations when necessary.

P1 : HEF

CU097 -01

CU097 -Huddleston.cls

February 7 , 2002

21 :2

3.2 Pronunciation and spelling

/ / versus / /

The opposition between / / and / / is a weak one in that there are very few word-pairs

kept distinct solely by this vowel quality difference. It is absent in many AmE accents –

those in which butt and but are pronounced alike in all contexts, in which just has the

same pronunciation whether it means “merely” or “righteous”, and in which lust always

rhymes with must regardless of stress. We show the distinction between these vowels here

(it is generally clear in BrE), but for many Americans both vowels could be written as / /.

/ju / versus /u /

In many words that have /ju / following an alveolar consonant in BrE, AmE has /u /.

Thus new, tune, due are /nju /, /tju n/, /dju / in BrE but usually /nu /, /tu n/, /du / in

AmE. We write /ju / in these cases; for AmE, ignore the /j/.

Intervocalic /t/

We ignore the AmE voicing of intervocalic /t/, contrasting latter as /læt r / and ladder as

/læd r / with the medial consonants distinguished as in BrE accents.

3.2 Pronunciation and spelling

The relation between the sounds shown by our transcription and the ordinary English

spelling of words is a complex one, and certain analytical concepts will help in keeping

clear about the difference.

Symbols and letters

When we match up written and spoken forms we ﬁnd that in the simplest cases one letter

corresponds to one sound, or phoneme: in /in/, cat /kæt/, help /help/, stand /stænd/, and

so on. But very often the match is more complex. For example, in teeth the two-letter

sequence ee corresponds to the single phoneme /i / and th to /θ/; in plateau the threeletter sequence eau corresponds to /oυ/ (a diphthong, analysed phonologically as a single

phoneme); in through the last four letters correspond to the phoneme /u /.

We will use symbol as a technical term for a unit of writing that corresponds to

a phoneme, and we will refer to those symbols consisting of more than one letter as

composite symbols.6 The letter e can form discontinuous composite vowel symbols

with any of the letters a , e , i , o , u: a . . . e as in pane, e . . . e as in dene, i . . . e as in bite,

o . . . e as in rode, and u . . . e as in cute.

Vowels and consonants

The categories vowel and consonant are deﬁned in terms of speech. Vowels have

unimpeded airﬂow through the throat and mouth, while consonants employ a signiﬁcant constriction of the airﬂow somewhere in the oral tract (between the vocal cords

and the lips).

The terms can be applied to writing derivatively: a vowel symbol is a

symbol representing a vowel sound, and a consonant symbol is a symbol representing a

consonant sound. We will speak of a vowel letter or a consonant letter only in the case

‘Digraph’ is widely used for a two-letter symbol and ‘trigraph’ is also found (though much less frequently) for a

three-letter symbol, but there is no established term for a four-letter symbol, and no cover term for composite

symbol.

P1 : HEF

CU097 -01

CU097 -Huddleston.cls

February 7 , 2002

21 :2

Chapter 1 Preliminaries

of non-composite symbols: a single letter constituting a whole symbol may be called a

vowel letter if it is a vowel symbol or a consonant letter if it is a consonant symbol. Thus

y is a vowel letter in fully (representing /i/); it is a consonant letter in yes (it represents

/j/); and in boy it is just part of a complex vowel symbol (representing / i/).

Similarly, u

is a vowel letter in fun (/ /), a consonant letter in quick (/w/), and part of a composite

symbol in mouth (/aυ/).7

It should be noted, however, that r counts as a consonant letter even in non-rhotic

accents, as shown by the rule of ﬁnal consonant letter doubling in inﬂected forms discussed in Ch. 18 , §2 .2 .1 : map/mapping, bat/batting, trek/trekking, pin/pinning, etc., are

parallelled by mar/ marring, with r doubling like other consonant letters. Similarly, the

e of the sufﬁx ·ed counts as a vowel symbol even when no vowel is pronounced (e.g. it

determines consonant doubling in forms like sipped /sipt/ and banned /bænd/).

In both

cases, of course, the spelling corresponds more closely to an earlier stage of the language

than to the contemporary language.

4 Theoretical framework

The primary goal of this grammar is to describe the grammatical principles of Presentday English rather than to defend or illustrate a theory of grammar. But the languages

human beings use are too complex to be described except by means of a theory. In this

section we clarify the relation between description and theory in this book, and outline

some of our most important theoretical distinctions.

4.1 Description and theory

The problem with attempting to describe English without having a theory of grammar

is that the language is too big to be described without bringing things together under

generalisations, and without a theory there are no generalisations.

It does not take much reﬂection to see that there is no deﬁnite length limit to sentences

in English. Sentences 100 words long, or longer, are commonly encountered (especially

in writing, for written sentences are on average longer than spoken ones).

And, given any

sentence, it is always easy to see how it could have been made even longer: an adjective

like good could be replaced by very good, or a verb like exceed could be supplied with a

preceding adverb to make something like dramatically exceed, or a noun like tree could

be replaced by tall tree, or the words I think could be added at the beginning of a whole

declarative clause, or the words and that’s what I told the police could be added at the end,

and so on through an endless series of different ways in which almost any grammatical

sentence of English could be lengthened without the result being something that is

recognisably not English.

The importance of the fact that English sentences can be constructed to be as long

as might be necessary to express some meaning is that it makes the sentences of English

impossible to encapsulate in a list. The number of sentences that have been spoken or

It will be clear, then, that we do not follow the traditional practice of simply dividing the alphabet into ﬁve

vowels (a , e , i , o , u) and twenty-one consonants: we will see that the traditional classiﬁcation does not provide

a satisfactory basis for describing the spelling alternations in English morphology.

P1 : HEF

CU097 -01

CU097 -Huddleston.cls

February 7 , 2002

21 :2

4.1 Description and theory

written so far is already astronomically vast, new ones are being produced every second

around the world by hundreds of millions of people, and no matter what the information

storage resources available, the problem is that there would be no way to decide where

to end the list.

An alternative to listing sentences is therefore needed. To describe the sentences

that belong to English we have to provide a general account of their structure that

makes their form follow from general statements, not about particular sentences but

about sentences of English quite generally. We need to bring together the principles that

sentences all conform to, so that we can use those principles to appreciate the structure

of new sentences as they are encountered, and see how new ones can be constructed.

This means developing a theory of the ways in which sentences can be put together

by combining words. This book is an attempt to summarise and illustrate as much as

possible of what has so far been determined about the ways in which sentences can

be constructed in English, and it presupposes a theory that classiﬁes the words of the

dictionary and speciﬁes ways in which they are combined to form sentences.

We emphasise, however, that it is not the aim of this book to convince the reader of

the merits of the theory for general linguistic description. Quite the reverse, in a sense:

wherever it is possible to make a factual point overshadow a general theoretical point,

we attempt to do that; whenever a theoretical digression would fail to illuminate further

facts about English, we curtail the digression; if ever the facts at hand can be presented

in a way that is neutral between competing theoretical frameworks, we try to present

them that way.

However, a signiﬁcant amount of space is devoted here to arguing carefully that the

particular analysis we have decided to adopt, within the framework of theory we assume,

is the right analysis. What we mean by that is that even someone with a different idea

about how to design a theory of syntax would have to come to a conclusion tantamount

to ours if they considered all the facts. It is necessary for us to provide arguments

concerning speciﬁc grammatical analyses in this book because, although this grammar

is descriptive like the great traditional grammars that have been published in the past, it

is not traditional in accepting past claims and analyses.

We depart from the tradition of English grammar at many points, sometimes quite

sharply. For example, in this book the reader will ﬁnd nothing of ‘noun clauses’ , ‘adjective

clauses’ , or ‘adverb clauses’ , because that traditional distinction in subordinate clause

classiﬁcation does not divide things satisfactorily and we have abandoned it. The reader

will likewise ﬁnd nothing of the traditional distinction between since as a preposition

(I haven’t seen them since Easter), since as an adverb (I haven’t seen them since), and since

as a subordinating conjunction (I haven’t seen them since they went overseas), because

we have concluded that this multiplication of categories for a single word with a single

meaning makes no sense; we claim that since belongs to the same category (preposition)

in all of its occurrences. On these and many other aspects of syntactic analysis we depart

from traditional analyses (we draw attention to the major cases of this kind in Ch. 2 ).

such points we provide detailed arguments to convince the reader that we have broken

with a mistaken tradition, and – we hope – made the correct decision about how to

replace it.

The reader will therefore ﬁnd much more discussion of grammatical concepts and

much more syntactic argumentation than is usually found in grammars of English. It

P1 : HEF

CU097 -01

CU097 -Huddleston.cls

February 7 , 2002

21 :2

Chapter 1 Preliminaries

is supplied, however, not to establish some wider theoretical point applying to other

languages, but simply to persuade the reader that our description is sound. While the

application of grammatical theories to the full range of human languages is an important

matter within linguistics, it is not the purpose of this book to develop that point. Detailed

technical or descriptive discussions that can be skipped by non-specialists without loss

of continuity have been set off in smaller type with a shaded background.

4.2 Basic concepts in syntax

Three essential concepts ﬁgure in the theory we use to describe English syntax in this

grammar. Each is very simple to grasp, but together they permit extremely broad and

powerful theories to be constructed for indeﬁnitely large collections of sentences. We

express them tersely in [1 ].

[1 ]

i Sentences have parts, which may themselves have parts.

ii The parts of sentences belong to a limited range of types.

iii The parts have speciﬁc roles or functions within the larger parts they belong to.

The idea that sentences have parts which themselves may have parts, i.e. that larger

stretches of material in a sentence are made up by putting together smaller stretches, is

the basis of ‘constituent structure’ analysis. The idea that the parts fall into a limited

range of types that we can name and refer to when giving a grammatical description is

the root of the concept of ‘syntactic categories’. And the idea that the parts also have

speciﬁc roles or functions, or special slots that they ﬁll in the larger parts they belong to, is

the idea of ‘grammatical functions’. The next three subsections are devoted to explaining

these three fundamental ideas.

4.2.1 Constituent structure

Sentences contain parts called constituents. Those constituents often have constituents

themselves, and those are made up from still shorter constituents, and so on. This

hierarchical composition of wholes from parts is called constituent structure.

Consider a simple one-clause sentence like A bird hit the car. It is divisible in the ﬁrst

instance into two parts, a bird (the subject) and hit the car (the predicate).

The phrase a

bird is itself made up of smaller parts, a and bird ; so is hit the car, which we divide into

hit and the car ; and ﬁnally the car also has two parts, the and car. This structure can be

represented as in [2 ].

[2 ]

bird

hit

the

car

Such representations of the constituent structure are called trees or tree-diagrams

(though the trees are upside down, with the root at the top and the ends of the smallest

Similar Papers