english syntax analysis

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1. What are morphology and syntax?

1.2. What is syntax?

Syntax is the study of sentence and phrase structure. In other words, syntax is the study of how we combine words and encode the relationships between them.

A phrase is any grammatically well-formed string of words. Some examples of English phrases are shown in (1).

A sentence , on the other hand, is a phrase that forms a complete thought. Some examples of English sentences are shown in (2).

Both phrases and sentences consist of strings of words, but is any string of words allowed? Consider the strings of words in (3). Compared to (1), they are scrambled and do not make much sense. In linguistics, we put an asterisk (*) at the beginning of an example to indicate that it is not well-formed. From the examples in (3), we can see that the order of the words matter.

Interestingly, we are able to identify if a sentence or phrase is well-formed even if we don’t understand all of the words used in the sentence. In (4), I give an example with nonce (made-up) words. Even though you can’t understand the sentence (because I just made up most of the words in it!), you can still tell that the words are in the right order and the sentence is well-formed.

Language profile: English

English is one of the most spoken languages of the world, with nearly 380 million first-language speakers and over 1 billion second-language speakers (Eberhard et al. 2023). It originated in England when people from northwestern Germany (the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes) invaded England in the fifth century, which had previously been inhabited by Celtic peoples.

English belongs to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. But it is also heavily influenced by some other languages. In 1066, the Norman French invaded England. They spoke a dialect of French and brought many French words into English, including court , crown , village , diamond , feast , and cream. Their influence also caused major changes in the grammatical structure of English. The variety of English spoken before the Norman invasion is known as Old English , while the variety of English spoken afterwards is known as Middle English . We now speak a variety known as Modern English , which is normally considered to have been spoken since around the year 1500 (Denning et al. 2007).

Because the British Empire took control of so many countries worldwide, English is spoken in dozens of countries, each of which has its own dialects and varieties of English—often more than one! All of these dialects have unique linguistic properties and a rich cultural heritage. You can listen to audio recordings of many different dialects and accents at the International Dialects of English Archive .

Word order patterns vary from language to language. In English, we put prepositions (words like in, at, on, and to ) before the noun they go with. But in many of the world’s languages, the same kind of word goes after the noun. In those languages, they are called postpositions instead. Japanese and Turkish are both examples of languages with postpositions, as shown in example (5).

(Pereltsvaig 2021: 98, 100)

In the Japanese example in (5a), the postposition ni meaning ‘in’ comes after the word nihon meaning ‘Japan’ to form the phrase ‘in Japan.’ In the Turkish example in (5b), the postposition ile meaning ‘with’ comes after the word vapur meaning ‘boat’ to form the phrase ‘with a boat.’

Formatting linguistic data

Linguists use very specific conventions for formatting and discussing linguistic data. We will learn together about how to format and discuss examples in Chapter 4 . However, as you read this textbook and other linguistics resources, you should pay attention to how examples are formatted and discussed, so that you can learn how to format and discuss data in your own work. Look for patterns and conventions, what works well, and what could be clearer.

Did you know? Adpositions

If you do not want to distinguish between postpositions and prepositions, you can use the word adposition .

According to Dryer (2013), about half of the world’s languages use prepositions and about half of the world’s languages use postpositions. A minority of languages do something else, such as not using adpositions at all, putting adpositions in the middle of words, or allowing adpositions to appear on either side of the noun.

Some of the things we study in syntax include the following:

• We look at how words are grouped into sentences and phrases.
• We classify phrases and sentences based on their structural, functional, and meaning properties.
• We determine the possible word orders of different kinds of phrases in particular languages.
• We determine whether words or phrases have relationships with other words or phrases in a sentence and how that affects their placement or their morphological form.
• We look for similarities and differences in phrase and sentence structure across languages.
• We create models to describe how each of the components of syntax interact to form phrases and sentences.
• We study how the structure of phrases and sentences interacts with other components of language, such as semantics .

One of the things that sets human language apart from other types of communication is how we are able to create new, specific meanings by combining words in a structured way. We do not merely string words together and guess at or infer how the different words are related. Their relationships are explicitly encoded through syntax—which is why we can say unlikely or even illogical things and have the meaning come through clearly.

This property is rather curious and unique. Emojis do not have it. When scientists have taught primates to sign, there is little evidence for syntactic structure in their communication. But without it, would we be able to have philosophical treatises or science fiction novels?

Key takeaways

• Syntax is the study of phrase and sentence structure.
• A phrase is any well-formed string of words, while a sentence forms a complete thought.
• In linguistics, we put an asterisk (*) in front of phrases and sentences that are not well-formed.
• Different languages have different word order patterns. For example, some languages have prepositions that go before the noun while other languages have postpositions that come after the noun.

Check yourself!

References and further resources, for a general audience.

🧠 CrashCourse. 2020. Syntax – Morphosyntax: Crash Course Linguistics #3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1r1grQiLdk

For linguistics students

Denning, Keith, Brett Kessler, and William R. Leben. 2007. English Vocabulary Elements. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

🔍 Doner, Julie and Tim Mills. 2020. Why we do syntax. Word to the Whys. Teaching in Linguistics Community of Practice. Podcast. https://sites.google.com/view/word-to-the-whys-podcast/home/syntax

Pereltsvaig, Asya. 2021. Languages of the World: An Introduction. 3rd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Academic sources

Dryer, Matthew. 2013. Order of adposition and noun phrase. In WALS Online (v2020.3), ed. Matthew Dryer and Martin Haspelmath. Zenodo. http://wals.info/chapter/85

📑 Eberhard, David M., Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig, eds. 2023. Ethnologue: Languages of the World . 26th edition. Dallas, TX: SIL International. http://www.ethnologue.com.uml.idm.oclc.org

🔍 Meier, Cameron (executive editor). 2023. International Dialects of English Archive . https://www.dialectsarchive.com

The study of the structure of sentences and phrases; the study of how we combine words and encode the relationships between them.

Any grammatically well-formed string of words.

A grammatically well-formed string of words that communicates a complete thought.

A made-up word for one-time use.

The variety of English spoken before the Norman invasion of England in 1066.

The variety of English spoken after the Norman invasion of England in 1066 until approximately the year 1500.

The varieties of English spoken from approximately the year 1500 until the present day.

A word describing the relationship between a noun and another part of the phrase and that occurs before the noun. See also adposition.

A word describing the relationship between a noun and another part of the phrase and that occurs after the noun. See also adposition.

A preposition or a postposition. A word describing the relationship between a noun and another part of the phrase.

The study of the conventional meaning of language, including the meaning of individual words (lexical semantics) and how meaning is derived from their combination (compositional semantics).

The Linguistic Analysis of Word and Sentence Structures Copyright © by Julianne Doner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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A SHORT OVERVIEW OF ENGLISH SYNTAX

Based on The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language

Rodney Huddleston

The University of Queensland

This paper presents a brief account of English syntax based on The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language , [1] providing an overview of the main constructions and categories in the language. The present version is intended primarily for members of the English Teachers' Association of Queensland (ETAQ), offering an alternative approach to that presented in the 2007 volume of their journal Words`Worth by Lenore Ferguson under the title `Grammar at the Coalface' - in particular the articles `The structural basics' (March 2007) and `Functional elements in a clause' (June 2007). I make use of concepts discussed in my own Words'Worth paper `Aspects of grammar: functions, complements and inflection' (March 2008), and take over Functional Grammar's useful convention of distinguishing between functions and classes by using an initial capital letter for the former: thus Subject is the name of a function, noun phrase the name of a class.

1 SENTENCE AND CLAUSE

We distinguish two main types of sentence: a clausal sentence , which has the form of a single clause, and a compound sentence , which has the form of two or more coordinated clauses, usually joined by a coordinator (such as and , or , but ):

[ 1 ]       i          Sue went to London last week.                                                       [clausal sentence]

ii          Sue went to London last week and her father went with her.     [compound sentence]

Note that such an example as We stayed at the hotel which you recommended is also a clausal sentence even though it contains two clauses. This is because one clause, which you recommended , is part of the other, rather than separate from it (more specifically, the which you recommended is part of the noun phrase the hotel which you recommended ); the larger clause is thus We stayed at the hotel which you recommended , and this does constitute the whole sentence, like that in [i].

The fact that the two types of sentence are distinguished in terms of clauses implies that we take the clause to be a more basic unit than the sentence, which reflects the fact that in speech it tends to be more difficult to determine the boundaries between sentences than the boundaries between clauses. For most of this overview we will focus on clauses: we return to coordination in Section14.

2 CANONICAL AND NON-CANONICAL CLAUSES

We can describe the structure of clauses most economically if we distinguish between the most basic and elementary kinds of clause, which we call canonical clauses , and the rest. The idea is that we can present the analysis more clearly if we begin with canonical clauses, describing them directly, and then deal in turn with the various kinds of non-canonical clause, describing these indirectly, in terms of how they differ from canonical clauses.

The following paired examples will give some idea of what is involved in this distinction:

[ 2 ]                 Canonical                                                     Non-canonical

  i    a.    She has read your article.                        b.   She hasn't read your article.

ii    a.    Sue is coming for dinner.                          b.   Is Sue coming for dinner?

iii    a.    They knew the victim.                               b.   She said that they knew the victim .

iv    a.    He missed the train.                                 b.   Either he missed the train or it is late .

v    a.    The secretary took the key.                      b.   The key was taken by the secretary.

These illustrate the following properties of canonical clauses:

o       They are positive ; negative clauses like [ib] are non-canonical.

o       They are declarative ; interrogatives like [iib] are non-canonical, as are the other clause types: imperatives (e.g. Please stand up ) and exclamatives ( What a fool I've been ).

o       They are main clauses ; the underlined clause in [iiib] is subordinate and hence non-canonical.

o       They are non-coordinate ; the two underlined clauses in [ivb] are coordinated and hence each of them is non-canonical.

o       They are active ; passive clauses like [vb] are non-canonical. This is a matter of information packaging and we can say, more generally, that canonical clauses package the information in the grammatically most basic way. Thus I have now read most of them is canonical but Most of them I have now read is not.

There are two further points that should be made at this point.

(a) In all the above examples the non-canonical clauses differ in their structure from canonical clauses, but this is not always so. In [iiib] the subordinate clause is introduced by that but we could omit this, giving She said they knew the victim , where the underlined clause is identical with [iiia]; nevertheless it is still subordinate and hence non-canonical. It is subordinate by virtue of being Complement of the verb said , but the subordination happens not to be marked in the internal grammatical structure of the clause itself.

(b) A clause is non-canonical if it lacks at least one of the above properties. It may of course lack more than one of them. Thus Wasn't the key taken by the secretary? has three non-canonical properties: it is negative, interrogative and passive. In the discussion below we will take the non-canonical properties in turn with the understanding that they can combine.

3 INITIAL LISTING OF THE PARTS OF SPEECH

We distinguish nine primary word classes, or parts of speech, to use the traditional term. In this overview we needn't worry about interjections ( wow , ah , hello , and the like), which leaves us with eight classes. They are named and exemplified in [3]:

[ 3 ]       i          Verb                 He is ill.                       She left early.               We want to help .

ii          Noun                 The dog barked.         Sue won easily.            I love you .

iii          Adjective          He's very young .         I've got a sore knee.     It looks easy .

iv          Adverb             She spoke clearly .      You're extremely fit.      He works very hard

v          Determinative The dog barked.         I've got a sore knee.     We need some milk.

vi          Preposition      He's in the garden.     It's from your uncle.       We went to Paris.

vii          Coordinator      We saw Kim and Pat.  Hurry or we'll be late.     It's cheap but good.

viii         Subordinator    I know that it's true.     Ask whether it's true.     I wonder if it's true.

Note that we use `determinative' as the name of a class and `Determiner' as the name of a function; [2] we need to invoke the class vs function distinction here to cater for the construction illustrated in the doctor's car . Here the doctor's has the same function, Determiner, as the in the car , but it is not a word and hence not a determinative: as far as its class is concerned it's a noun phrase.

The above scheme differs from that of traditional grammar in three respects:

o       We take pronouns to be a subclass of nouns, not a distinct primary class.

o       Traditional grammars generally take our determinatives to be a subclass of adjectives, though some recognise a class of articles consisting of the and a . Our determinative class is much larger, containing not just the and a , but also words like some , any , all , each , every, no , etc.; these are very different from words like those underlined in [iii].

o       We have coordinator and subordinator as distinct primary classes, whereas traditional grammar has a primary class of conjunctions subdivided into coordinating and subordinating conjunctions.

For each of the first six of the word classes in [3] there is a corresponding class of phrases whose Head belongs to that class. In the following examples, the phrase is enclosed in brackets and the Head underlined:

[ 4 ]       i          Verb phrase                    She [ wrote some letters ] .     He [ is still in London ] .

ii          Noun phrase                   [ The new lodger ] is here.     [ The boss ] wants to see [ you ] .

iii          Adjective phrase             It's getting [ rather late ] .        I'm [ glad you could come ] .

iv          Adverb phrase                I spoke [ too soon ] .              It's [ quite extraordinarily ] good.

v          Determinative phrase     I saw [ almost every ] card.    We've [ very little ] money left.

vi          Preposition phrase         They're [ in the garden ] .       He wrote a book [ on sharks ] .

5 THE STRUCTURE OF CANONICAL CLAUSES

5 . 1 Subject and Predicate

A canonical clause consists of a Subject followed by a Predicate. The Predicate is realised by a verb phrase; the Subject is mostly realised by a noun phrase, but there are other possibilities too, most importantly a subordinate clause:

[ 5 ]                 Subject                        Predicate

  i          One of his friends      |   called a doctor.                                [noun phrase as Subject]

ii          That he was lying      |   was obvious.                          [subordinate clause as Subject]

In canonical clauses describing an action the Subject will be associated with the semantic role of actor, or agent, as in [5i]. But many clauses don't express actions: we heard an explosion , for example, describes a sensory experience, and here the Subject is associated with the role of experiencer. There are numerous different kinds of semantic role that can be associated with the Subject: what the role is in a particular instance will depend on the meaning of the clause, especially of the verb.

Meaning therefore does not provide a reliable way of identifying the Subject. But this function has a good few distinctive grammatical properties which together generally make it easy to identify. Here are some of them.

(a) Position . Its default position - the one it occupies unless there are special reasons for placing it elsewhere - is before the Predicate.

(b) Formation of interrogatives . You can generally change a declarative clause into an interrogative by inverting the Subject with the first auxiliary verb; if there is no auxiliary in the declarative you need to insert the appropriate form of do . [3] In either case the Subject ends up following the auxiliary verb:

[ 6 ]                 Declarative                                                  Interrogative

  i    a.    The boss is in her office.                          b.   Is the boss in her office?

ii    a.    Everyone signed the petition.                   b.   Did everyone sign the petition?

(c) Interrogative tags . To seek confirmation of a statement you can add an interrogative tag, consisting of an auxiliary verb and a personal pronoun Subject which relates back to the Subject of the clause to which the tag is attached: The boss is in her office, isn't she ? ; Everyone signed the petition, didn't they ?

(d) Subject-verb agreement , Where the verb has person-number properties (in the present tense and the past tense of be ), they are normally determined by agreement with the Subject:

[ 7 ]          a.    Her son plays the piano.                          b.   Her sons play the piano.

5 . 2 Predicator, Complements and Adjuncts

At the next layer of structure below the Predicate we distinguish three functions. The Predicator is the function filled by the verb. The verb is the Head of the verb phrase, and Predicator is the special term used for the Head of the verb phrase forming the Predicate of a clause. Thus in [7b] play the piano is a verb phrase functioning as Predicate while play is a verb functioning as Predicator.

Complement and Adjunct are different kinds of Dependent, distinguished by the licensing condition. Complements can occur only if they are licensed by the Head verb: the verb must belong to a subclass that permits (or requires) a Complement of the type in question. Adjuncts are not subject to this restriction. Compare:

[ 8 ]                 I mowed the lawn before it started to rain.

Here the lawn is admissible because the verb mow (unlike disappear , for example) allows a Dependent of this kind, so the lawn is a Complement. But a Dependent indicating time can occur with any verb, so before it started to rain is an Adjunct.

We will look further at Complements in the next subsection. As for Adjuncts, they are usually realised by adverb phrases, preposition phrases, subordinate clauses, or a very narrow range of noun phrases. They can be divided into various semantic subtypes, such as Adjuncts of time, place, manner, etc., as illustrated in [9]:

[ 9 ]       i          She spoke very clearly .                                     [adverb phrase as Adjunct of manner]

ii          As a result of his action , he was fired.                   [prep phrase as Adjunct of reason]

iii          We cycle to work to save the busfare .       [subordinate clause as Adjunct of purpose]

iv          They left the country last week .                                [noun phrase as Adjunct of time]

5 . 3 Object and Predicative Complement

Two important subtypes of Complement are the Object and the Predicative Complement:

[ 10 ]        a.    Object: Ed blamed the minister .               b.   Predicative Comp : Ed was a minister ..

While thousands of verbs license an Object, only a fairly small number license a Predicative Complement, and of these be is by far the most common: others include become , remain , appear , seem , etc. The term `Predicative Complement' is most easily understood by reference to the construction with be : the verb has little meaning here (it is often called just a `linking verb'), so that the main semantic content of the Predicate is expressed by the Complement.

There are several grammatical properties that distinguish Objects from Predicative Complements, of which the two most important ones are illustrated in [11]:

[ 11 ]     i    a.    Ed blamed the minister . [Object]              b.   The minister was blamed by Ed.

ii    a.    Ed was a minister . [Pred Comp]               b.   * A minister was been by Ed.

iii    a.    Ed was innocent . [Pred Comp]                b.   * Ed blamed innocent.

o       The Object of an active clause can usually become the Subject of a corresponding passive clause, but a Predicative Complement never can. Thus the Object of active [ia] corresponds to the Subject of passive [ib], whereas [iib] is not a possible passive version of [iia]. (Here and below the asterisk indicates that what follows is ungrammatical.)

o       A Predicative Complement can be realised not only by a noun phrase, as in [iia], but also by an adjective phrase, as in [iiia], whereas an Object cannot be realised by an adjective phrase, as evident from the ungrammaticality of [iiib].

5 . 4 Direct and Indirect Object

A clause may contain two Objects, distinguished as Direct and Indirect. In canonical clauses, the Indirect Object always precedes the Direct Object, and typically (but not invariably) is associated with the semantic role of recipient or beneficiary:

[ 12 ]     i          He gave the prisoner some water .               [Indirect Object (recipient) + Direct Object]

ii          She baked me a cake .                             [Indirect Object (beneficiary) + Direct Object]

5 . 5 Subjective and Objective Predicative Complements

The Predicative Complements in [10b] and [11iia/iiia] are related to the Subject, but it is also possible for a Predicative Complement to be related to the Object: we accordingly distinguish two subtypes, Subjective and Objective. Compare:

[ 13 ]               Subjective Pred Comp                                 Objective Pred Comp

  i    a.    He became angry .                                    b.   This made him angry .

ii    a.    He was a charlatan .                                 b.   They considered him a charlatan .

5 . 6 Five canonical clause structures

On the basis of the presence or absence of the Complement types considered so far we can distinguish the following canonical clause structures:

[ 14 ]               Example                                     Structure              Name

  i          They disappeared.                       S-P                       (Ordinary) intransitive

ii          They were ecstatic.                       S-P-PC s                 Complex-intransitive

iii          They bought a house.                  S-P-O d                   (Ordinary) monotransitive

iv          They kept it warm.                        S-P-O d -PC o             Complex-transitive

v          They sent her some flowers.         S-P-O i -O d               Ditransitive

In the representations of the structures, S stands for Subject, P for Predicator, PC s for Subjective Predicative Complement, O d for Direct Object, PC o for Objective Predicative Complement, and O i for Indirect Object. The names reflect the fact that there are two dimensions of contrast:

o       One has to do with Objects: an intransitive clause has no Object, a monotransitive clause has a single Object, and a ditransitive clause has two Objects.

o       The other has to with Predicative Complements: if a clause contains a Predicative Complement it is complex, otherwise ordinary, though the latter term is often omitted (as it is in [v], since there is no possibility of adding a Predicative Complement to a ditransitive clause).

         The names apply in the first instance to the clause constructions, and then derivatively to the verbs that appear in these constructions. Thus disappear is an (ordinary) intransitive verb, be a complex-intransitive one, and so on. But it must be borne in mind that the majority of verbs can appear in more than one of them, and hence belong to more than one class. Find , for example, commonly appears in [iii] ( We found the key ), [iv] ( We found her co-operative ), and [v] ( We found her a job ).

5 . 7 Prepositional and clausal Complements.

The Complements considered so far have been noun phrases or adjective phrases, but these are not the only possibilities. Complements often have the form of preposition phrases or subordinate clauses:

[ 15 ]     i    a.    She went to Paris .                                    b.   She took him to Paris .

ii    a.    She relied on her instinct .                         b.   He congratulated her on her promotion .

iii    a.    He said he was sorry .                               b.   He told her he was sorry .

iv    a.    We intend to leave on Tuesday .               b.   I advise you to leave on Tuesday .

In the [a] examples here the underlined preposition phrase ([i-ii]) or subordinate clause ([iii-iv]) is the only Complement, while in the [b] ones it follows an Object. We look at different kinds of subordinate clause in Section13, but there is one point to be made here about the prepositional constructions. In [i] to contrasts with other prepositions such as over , from , via , beyond , etc., but in [ii] on is selected by the verb: any adequate dictionary will tell you (if only by example) that rely takes a Complement with on , consist with of , refer with to , and so on. Verbs like these that take as Complement a preposition phrase headed by some specified preposition are called `prepositional verbs'. Most ditransitive verbs also belong to this latter class by virtue of licensing a preposition phrase with to or for instead of the Indirect Object: compare He gave some water to the prisoner and She baked a cake for me with [12] above.

6 . 1 Verb inflection

The most distinctive property of verbs is their inflection: they have a number of inflectional forms that are permitted or required in various grammatical constructions. The present tense form takes , for example, can occur as the verb of a canonical clause, whereas the past participle taken cannot: She takes care, but not * She taken care.

The great majority of verb lexemes have six inflectional forms, as illustrated in [16]:

[ 16 ]     i          Preterite                           checked          She checked the figures herself.

ii          3rd singular present        checks             She checks the figures herself.

iii          Plain present                    check               They check the figures themselves.

iv          Plain form                         check               She may check the figures herself.

v          Gerund-participle             checking          She is checking the figures herself.

vi          Past participle                  checked          She had checked the figures herself.

It will be noticed that although we have distinguished six different inflectional forms , there are only four different shapes : checked , checks , check and checking . By `shape' we mean the spelling or pronunciation. Thus the preterite and past participle of the lexeme check have the same shape, as do the plain present tense and the plain form. The same applies to all other regular verbs, i.e. verbs whose inflectional forms are determined by general rules. But there are a good number of irregular verbs where the preterite and past participle do not have the same shape: take , for example, has took as its preterite and taken as its past participle.

This means that it is very easy to decide whether any particular instance of the shape check is a preterite form or a past participle. What you need to do is ask which form of a verb like take would be needed in the construction in question. Consider, then, the following examples:

[ 17 ]     i          She may have checked the figures herself.

ii          I'm not sure whether she checked the figures herself or not.

If we substitute take for check in [i] the form we need is the past participle taken : She may have taken a break . So this checked is likewise a past participle. And if we make the substitution in [ii] we need the preterite form took : I'm not sure whether she took a break or not . So the checked of [ii] is the preterite form. Note that when making the substitution you need to keep constant what precedes the verb (e.g. She may have in [i]) since this is what determines the inflection that is required: what follows the verb is irrelevant and hence can be changed to suit the verb you are substituting.

Let us now briefly review the six forms.

(a) Preterite . This is a type of past tense: the type where the past tense is marked inflectionally rather than by means of an auxiliary verb. Many grammars use the more general term `past tense': we prefer the more specific term to distinguish it from the construction where the auxiliary have marks the other kind of past tense, as in She has checked the proofs .

(b)-(c) The present tense forms . There are two present tense forms, one which occurs with a 3rd person singular subject, and one which occurs with any other subject: 1st person ( I check ), 2nd person ( you check ) or plural ( they check ). We could call this latter form `non-3rd person singular', but `plain present' is simpler. `Plain' indicates that it is identical with the morphological base of the lexeme, i.e. the starting-point for the rules that produce the various inflectional forms by adding a suffix, changing the vowel, and so on.

(d) The plain form . This is also identical with the base, but it is not a present tense form. It is used in three constructions:

[ 18 ]     i          Imperative      Check the figures yourself!

ii          Infinitival         It's better to check the figures oneself . I will check them myself.

iii          Subjunctive    It's essential that she check the figures herself.

The infinitival construction is very often marked by to , but it is also found without to after such verbs as can , may , will , do ( She didn't check the figures herself ), make ( They made me check the figures myself ), etc. The subjunctive is much the least frequent of the three constructions and belongs to somewhat formal style.

There are two major factors that distinguish the plain form from the plain present:

o       The verb be is highly exceptional in its inflection in that it has three present tense forms instead of the usual two ( is , am , are ) and all of these are different in shape from the plain form be . It's the latter form that appears in the three constructions shown in [18]: Be quiet (imperative); It's better to be safe than sorry , I will be ready in time (infinitival); It's essential that she be told (subjunctive). So we can tell whether a given instance of check , say, is the plain present or the plain form by using the substitution test illustrated above, but this time substituting the verb be . Thus the check of We must check the figures is a plain form, not a plain present tense because we need the plain form of be in this position: We must be careful .

o       The plain present doesn't occur with 3rd person singular Subjects, but the plain form does. Compare She checks the figures herself (not * She check the figures herself ) and She will check the figures herself (not * She will checks the figures herself ).

(e) The gerund-participle . This form always ends with the suffix @ ing . Traditional grammar distinguishes two forms with this suffix, the gerund and the present participle:

[ 19 ]     i          Checking the figures can be onerous                                             [traditional gerund]

ii          People checking the figures must be alert                      [traditional present participle]

The idea was that a gerund is comparable to a noun, while a participle is comparable to an adjective. Thus in [i] checking the figures is comparable to such checks , where checks is a noun; in [ii] checking the figures is Modifier to people and was therefore considered adjective-like since the most common type of Modifier to a noun is an adjective. [4] There is, however, no verb in English that has distinct forms for the constructions in [19], and so there is no basis for making any inflectional distinction here in Present-day English: we thus have a single form and the name `gerund-participle' indicates that it covers both traditional categories.

(f) The past participle . This is used in two main constructions, the perfect and the passive:

[ 20 ]     i          Perfect            She has checked the figures.

ii          Passive          The figures must be checked by the boss.

The perfect is a past tense marked by the auxiliary verb have , while the most straightforward cases of the passive involve the auxiliary verb be . We retain the traditional term `past participle', though the `past' component of meaning applies just to the perfect construction.

6 . 2 The inflectional tense system

We have seen that there are two inflectional tenses in English: preterite and present; we review now the major uses of these tenses.

(a) Preterite . Three uses can be distinguished, as illustrated in [21]:

[ 21 ]     i          Past time                 a. He arrived yesterday.         b. She knew him well.

ii          Backshift                 a. Ed said he was ill.              b. I thought it started tomorrow.

iii          Modal remoteness a. I wish I knew the answer.    b. I'd do it if you paid me.

o       In [i] we see the basic use, indicating past time. The event of his arriving took place in the past, and the state of her knowing him well obtained in the past (it may still obtain now, but I'm talking about some time in the past). This is much the most frequent use, but it's important to be aware that the preterite doesn't always have this meaning.

o       Example [iia] could be used to report Ed's saying `I am ill': present tense am is shifted back to preterite was under the influence of the preterite reporting verb said . In [iib] my original thought was `It starts tomorrow': again present tense starts is shifted back to preterite started . This example shows very clearly that the backshift use is not the same as the past time use, for clearly the starting is not in the past.

o       In [iii] the preterite has a modal rather than temporal meaning: it has to do with factuality, not time. In [iiia] the subordinate clause has a counterfactual meaning under the influence of wish : you understand that I don't know the answer. The time is present, not past: I don't know it now. The conditional [iiib] is not counterfactual (it doesn't rule out the possibility of your paying me), but it envisages your paying me as a somewhat remote possibility - rather less likely than with the present tense counterpart I'll do it if you pay me. Note that the time of your possibly paying me is in the future. We use the term `modal remoteness' to cover both these interpretations (as well as others mentioned briefly in Section6.5).

(b) The present tense . The two most important uses are seen in [22]:

[ 22 ]     i          Present time            a. I promise I'll help you.        b. She lives in Sydney.

ii          Future time              a. Exams start next week.       b. I'll go home when it gets dark.

o       In [i] we again have the basic and much the most common use: to indicate present time. In [ia] the event of my promising is actually simultaneous with the utterance, for I perform the act of promising by saying this sentence. In [ib] we have a state, and the present tense indicates that the state obtains at the time of speaking.

o       In [ii] the time is future. In main clauses this is possible only when the event is in some way already scheduled, as in [iia]. But this constraint does not apply in various kinds of subordinate clause such as we have in [iib].

6 . 3 Auxiliary verbs

We turn now to the important subclass of verbs called auxiliary verbs , or auxiliaries : they are quite markedly different in their grammatical behaviour from other verbs, which are called lexical verbs .

6 . 3 . 1 Membership of the class

The main members of the auxiliary class are shown in [23], where they are divided into two subclasses, modal and non-modal :

[ 23 ]     i          Modal auxiliaries           can , may , must , will , shall , ought , need , dare

ii          Non-modal auxiliaries    be , have , do

( Could , might , would and should are the preterite forms of can , may , will and shall respectively, though they differ considerably from other preterites, as we shall see.)

6 . 3 . 2 Distinctive properties

There are several constructions which require the presence of an auxiliary verb, the two most frequent of which involve Subject-auxiliary inversion and negation.

(a) Subject-auxiliary inversion . We have seen that in canonical clauses the Subject precedes the verb whereas in most interrogative main clauses the Subject follows the (first) verb. The verb that precedes the Subject, however, must be an auxiliary verb: only auxiliaries can invert with the Subject. Compare:

[ 24 ]               Auxiliary verb                                              Lexical verb

  i    a.    She has taken the car.                             b.   She took the car.                [declarative]

ii    a.    Has she taken the car?                            b.   * Took she the car?           [interrogative]

If the declarative doesn't contain an auxiliary, as in [ib], it is necessary to insert the auxiliary do so that inversion can apply: Did she take the car? This do has no meaning: it is simply inserted to satisfy the grammatical rule requiring an auxiliary.

(b) Negation . The construction where not is used to negate the verb likewise requires that the verb be an auxiliary:

[ 25 ]               Auxiliary verb                                              Lexical verb

  i    a.    She has taken the car.                             b.   She took the car.                     [positive]

ii    a.    She has not taken the car.                       b.   * She took not the car.            [negative]

Again, if there is no auxiliary in the positive, do must be inserted to form the negative: She did not take the car .

A further, related, point is that auxiliaries, but not lexical verbs, have negative forms ending in the suffix n't : a more informal variant of [25iia] is She hasn't taken the car .

6 . 3 . 3 Auxiliaries as Heads

It is important to emphasise that auxiliaries contrast with lexical verbs, not with what some grammars call `main verbs'. Auxiliaries function as Head, not Dependent, in verb phrase structure. They mostly take non-finite clauses as Complement, like many lexical verbs. Compare the examples in [26], where the verb phrase is enclosed in brackets, the Head is in capitals and underlining marks the non-finite clause functioning as its Complement:

[ 26 ]               Auxiliary verb as Head                                Lexical verb as Head

  i    a.    They [ OUGHT to accept the offer ] .           b.   They [ INTEND to accept the offer ] .

ii    a.    We [ CAN answer their queries ] .                b.   We [ HELP answer their queries ] .

iii    a.    She [ WAS checking the figures ] .              b.   She [ BEGAN checking the figures ] .

iv    a.    He [ WAS attacked by a dog ] .                   b.   He [ GOT attacked by a dog ] .

The particular type of non-finite clause that is used depends on the Head verb, whether auxiliary or lexical. Ought and intend license infinitivals with to , can and help infinitivals without to ; be , in one of its uses, and begin license a non-finite clause with a gerund-participle form of the verb; be , in a second use, and get license one with a past participle form of the verb.

Note, then, that the verb phrase in [iiia], say, is divided into was + checking the figures , not was checking + the figures , just as that in [iiib] is divided into began + checking the figures , not began checking + the figures . And similarly with the other examples.

6 . 4 The non-modal auxiliaries, be , have , do

Little further need be said about do : it is used in constructions like Subject-auxiliary inversion and negation when required to satisfy the requirement that the construction contain an auxiliary. There is also a lexical verb do used in clauses like She did her best , I did him an injustice , etc.; here, then, auxiliary do must be added to form interrogatives and negatives: Did she do her best? , I didn't do him an injustice.

(a) Be . Three uses of be can be distinguished, illustrated in :

[ 27 ]     i          Progressive marker   a. They are watching TV.    b. I've been working all morning.

ii          Passive marker          a. It was taken by Jill.          b. He may be arrested.

iii          Copula                        a. She was a friend of his. b. That is very likely.

o       In [i], where be is followed by a verb in the gerund-participle form, it is a marker of progressive aspect. It generally serves to indicate that the situation - the action, event, state, or whatever - was, is or will be in progress at the time in question.

o       The clauses in [ii] are passive; [iia] is the passive counterpart of active Jill took it , the presence of be being one of the major differences between the two forms. There is no active counterpart of [iib] because the latter has no by phrase (cf. Section15).

o       In [iii] be is the only verb, but it still behaves as an auxiliary. Thus the interrogative of [a] is Was she a friend of his? and the negative of [b] is That isn't very likely . In these examples the auxiliary has as its Complement not a non-finite clause but a noun phrase ( a friend of his ) and an adjective phrase ( very likely ).

(b) Have . This verb belongs to both lexical and auxiliary classes. In She had a swim it is a lexical verb, for the interrogative and negative counterparts are Did she have a swim? and She didn't have a swim . The auxiliary uses are seen in [28]:

[ 28 ]     i          Perfect marker     a. He has broken his leg.     b. He may have taken it yesterday.

ii          Static have           a. She has enough credit.    b. We have to invite them all.

o       The perfect is marked by auxiliary have + a past participle. It is best regarded as a secondary past tense - the primary past tense being the inflectional preterite. Note, for example, that the preterite is found only in finite constructions such as He took it yesterday , so it can't occur after may (cf. * He may took it yesterday : may takes an infinitival clause as Complement), and perfect have is then used instead, as in [ib]. Since have itself can inflect for tense, [ia] is doubly marked for tense: it is `past in present', the past being marked by the lexeme have and the present by the inflection on have . This reflects the fact that while the event of his breaking his leg is located in past time it is seen as having relevance to the present. The most likely scenario is that his leg has not yet healed, so that he is at present incapacitated. The present tense component also explains why it is not normally possible to add an Adjunct like yesterday : * He has broken his leg yesterday.

o       Have in [ii] denotes a state, unlike that of the above She had a swim , which is dynamic, denoting an event. Usage is divided as to whether static have is an auxiliary or a lexical verb. Those who say She hasn't enough credit or Have we to invite them all? and the like are treating it as an auxiliary, while those who say She doesn't have enough credit or Do we have to invite them all? are treating it as a lexical verb. Many people use both constructions, though the lexical verb treatment has been gaining ground for some time. Note that in [iia] have , like be in [27], doesn't have a non-finite clause as Complement.

6 . 5 The modal auxiliaries

In this section we first note that need and dare , like do and have above, belong to both auxiliary and lexical verb classes; we next set out the main grammatical properties that define the class of modal auxiliaries, then consider the preterite forms, and finally look at the kinds of meaning they express.

(a) Need and dare . These are auxiliaries only when followed by an infinitival construction without to , as in Need I bother? and I daren't tell them , etc. Thus in I need a haircut , I need to get my hair cut , I dare you to repeat that , etc. we have lexical verbs.

(b) Distinctive grammatical properties of modal auxiliaries

o       They have only tensed forms: no plain form, no gerund-participle, no past participle. Hence the impossibility of * I'd like to may go with you ; * We're musting invite them all , * She has could speak French since she was a child .

o       They are invariable in the present tense instead of having a distinct form in @ s used with 3rd person singular Subjects: She can swim , not * She cans swim , etc.

o       With one exception they license a following infinitival Complement without to : She can swim , not * She can to swim . The exception is ought : They ought to accept the offer (=[26ia]).

Note that although We have to invite them all has essentially the same meaning as We must invite them all , this have is not a modal auxiliary: it has none of the above three grammatical properties. It is a special case of the static have , illustrated in [28ii], and as such it is for many speakers not an auxiliary at all, but a lexical verb.

(c) The preterite forms . Could , might , would and should are the preterite forms of can , may , will and shall respectively, but the use of these preterites differs from that of other preterite forms in Present-day English.

o       Only could and would have the basic preterite use of indicating past time: I could do it easily when I was younger ; I asked him to help but he wouldn't .

o       The status of might and should as preterites is established by their use in certain conditional constructions and in those cases of reported speech or thought where present tense forms are excluded. Thus though we can have may in If you come back tomorrow you may find him in , we need might in If you came back tomorrow you might find him in . [5] And if at some time in the past I had the thought `I shall easily finish before she returns' I would report this with should , as in I knew I should easily finish before she returned (not * shall ).

o       The major difference is that while with other verbs the modal remoteness use of the preterite is restricted to certain kinds of subordinate clause, with the modal auxiliaries it occurs in main clauses and with a wider range of interpretation; with might and should  it is overwhelmingly the most frequent use. The preterites tend to be weaker, more tentative or polite than the present tense forms.

(d) Types of modal meaning . The modal auxiliaries express a considerable variety of meanings, but they can be grouped into three major types.

o       Epistemic modality . Here we are concerned with what is necessary, likely or possible: He must have overslept ; Dinner should be ready in a few minutes ; She may be ill .

o       Deontic modality . Here it is a matter of what is required or permitted: You must work harder ; You should be studying for your exam ; You can / may go with them if you like .

o       Dynamic modality . Here it is a question of properties or dispositions of persons or other entities involved in the situation: She can speak very persuasively (ability), Will you help me? (willingness). This kind of meaning is mainly found with just can , will and dare .

In some cases there is a clear ambiguity as to which type of meaning is intended. You must be very tactful , for example, can be interpreted epistemically (I'm inferring from evidence that you are very tactful) or deontically (I'm telling you to be very tactful). She can't be serious may be understood epistemically (She is obviously not being serious) or dynamically (She is unable to be serious).

7 NOUNS AND NOUN PHRASES

7 . 1 Distinctive properties of nouns

Nouns form much the largest word class. It contains all words that denote physical entities, but also great numbers of words that do not have this semantic property: in order to be able to identify nouns we therefore need to examine their grammatical properties. We consider them under three headings: inflection, function and dependents.

(a) Inflection . Nouns generally exhibit inflectional contrasts of number and case :

[ 29 ]                        Number                              Case

                                                               Plain                            Genitive

  i                    Singular                             student                        student's

ii                    Plural                                 students                       students'

School grammars commonly use the term `possessive' instead of `genitive', but that term is far too specific for the wide range of relationships covered by this case: compare, for example, Kim's parents , the boys' behaviour , the train's arrival , the mayor's obituary , the sun's rays , today's news .

(b) Function . Nouns can function as Head in noun phrases that in turn function as Subject or Complement in clause structure, or Complement of a preposition, as illustrated in [30], where nouns are underlined and noun phrases bracketed:

[ 30 ]     i          Subject in clause                             [ One student ] was arrested.

ii          Complement in clause                     They interviewed [ all the students ].

iii          Complement in prep phrase             The talk was given by [ a student ].

(c) Dependents . There are some kinds of Dependent that occur exclusively (or almost exclusively) with a noun as Head:

[ 31 ]     i          Certain determinatives    the student , a school , every book , which exam

ii          Pre-head adjectives .       mature students , a new book , an easy exam

iii          Relative clauses              the student who directed the play , a book I'm reading

7 . 2 The structure of noun phrases

Noun phrases typically consist of a Head noun alone or accompanied by one or more Dependents. The Dependents are of three main types: Determiners, Complements and Modifiers.

(a) Determiners . These are found uniquely in the structure of noun phrases. They have the form of determinatives (or determinative phrases, as in almost all students , not many people , too few volunteers ) or genitive noun phrases ( the girl's voice , some people's behaviour , my book ).

Determiners serve to mark the noun phrase as definite or indefinite .

[ 32 ]     i          Definite        the Premier of NSW , the key , this book , both copies, the man's death

ii          Indefinite    a politician , some keys , any serious book , enough copies , three dogs

We use a definite noun phrase when we assume that its content is sufficient, in the context , to identify the referent. There's only one (current) Premier of NSW, so the definiteness in the first example is unproblematic, but with the second example there is of course very heavy reliance on context to make the referent clear. The is a pure marker of definiteness, known as the definite article . Its use effectively pre-empts a which question: if I say Where's the key? I assume you won't need to ask Which key? Note that a genitive Determiner confers definiteness on the noun phrase: the man's death means ` the death of the man', and a man's death likewise means ` the death of a man'. Noun phrases like black coffee and friends , which have a common noun as Head and no Determiner are normally indefinite.

(b) Complements . The clearest cases of Complements involve preposition phrases where the preposition is specified by the Head noun, and certain types of subordinate clause:

[ 33 ]     i          Preposition phrases    her review of the play , a ban on alcohol , his marriage to Sue

ii          Subordinate clauses    the idea that he might be ill , an opportunity to make friends

Note that nouns, unlike verbs, do not take Objects: we say She reviewed the play , but not * her review the play ; instead we need of the play . With ban and marriage the prepositions required are on and to . The subordinate clauses in [ii] clearly satisfy the licensing test: only a fairly narrow range of nouns can take Complements like these.

(c) Modifiers . The typical pre-Head Modifier is an adjective or adjective phrase: a good book , a very serious matter . But those are not the only possibilities. In particular, nouns can also function as Modifier to a Head noun: a school play , the unemployment situation , etc. Post-Head Modifiers are typically preposition phrases and subordinate clauses that occur more freely than Complements in that they do not have to be licensed by the Head noun: a man of honour , the house opposite the post office , the play that she wrote , the guy who spoke first .

It is also possible to have Modifiers that precede the Determiner: all the books , both these plays , too small a car for our needs . Note that adverbs can occur in this position, but not after the Determiner: absolutely the best solution , but not * an absolutely success . Instead of the latter we need an adjective, an absolute success .

7 . 3 Number and countability

(a) Nouns with fixed number . Although most nouns have an inflectional contrast between singular and plural, there are a good few that do not - that have only singular or only plural forms:

[ 34 ]     i          Singular-only nouns     crockery , dross , harm , nonsense ; news , mumps , physics , ...

ii          Plural-only nouns         belongings , clothes , genitals , scissors ; cattle , police , ...

Note that the last three items in [i] end in @ s but are nevertheless singular, as evident, for example, from the agreement in This news is good . Conversely, the last two items in [ii] don't end in @ s , but are nevertheless plural: cf. These cattle are in good health .

(b) Count and non-count nouns . Related to the distinction between nouns with variable number and nouns with fixed number is that between count and non-count nouns. Count nouns can take cardinal numerals ( one , two , three , etc.) as Dependent, while non-count nouns cannot. Compare count student ( one student , two students ) and non-count harm and clothes (* one harm / clothes , * two harms / clothes ).

However, most nouns can occur with either a count or a non-count interpretation :

[ 35 ]               Count interpretation                                     Non-count interpretation

  i    a.    He pulled out a white hair .                        b.   He has white hair .

ii    a.    Have another cake .                                  b.   Have some more cake .

iii    a.    Can I borrow your football .                       b.   Let's play football .

The interpretations in [a] allow for a contrast between one and more than one (cf., for example, He pulled out two white hairs ), but those in [b] do not. When we speak of count and non-count nouns, therefore, we are referring to nouns as used with a count and non-count interpretation. Thus hair is a count noun in [ia], a non-count noun in [ib], and so on.

(c) Subject-verb agreement . We noted in Section5.1 that where a verb has person-number properties they normally agree with those of the Subject noun phrase, more particularly with those of the Head noun of that noun phrase: The dog is barking vs The dogs are barking . There are, however, certain semantically-motivated types of departure from this pattern, as illustrated in [36]:

[ 36 ]     i          Measure expressions              Two hours isn't long enough for such a job.

ii          Quantificational nouns             A lot of people like it.

iii          Collective nouns                     The jury haven't yet reached a decision.

o       In [i] the hours aren't thought of individually but as making up a single period, so the Subject is treated as singular.

o       In [ii] the verb-form is determined not by the Head noun lot but by people , which is embedded within the Subject noun phrase.

o       With collective nouns like jury in [iii] there is divided usage, with singular hasn't also used.

7 . 4 Subclasses of noun

There are three main subclasses of noun: common noun , proper noun and pronoun . Common noun is the default subclass and needs no further comment here.

(a) Proper nouns . This subclass includes nouns such as John , Mary , Smith , Beethoven , Sydney , Egypt , Nile , Easter, Friday , etc. They characteristically function as Head of noun phrases serving as proper names , names individually assigned to particular people, places, festivals, days of the week, and so on. Note, however, that they also occur, derivatively, in other kinds of noun phrase: That's not the Smith I was referring to , Let's listen to some Beethoven . Conversely, not all proper names contain proper nouns: cf. Central Avenue , New Year's Day , and so on. And some proper names contain more than just a proper noun: the Nile , Mt Everest , King John .

(b) Pronouns . The grammatically distinctive property of pronouns is that they do not normally combine with Determiners: He arrived , not * The he arrived . There are several subtypes of pronoun, including:

[ 37 ]     i          Personal pronouns                                 I , we , you , he , she , it , they , one

ii          Reciprocal pronouns                              each other , one another

iii          Interrogative or relative pronouns         who , what , which , whoever , etc.

We will comment here on only the first of these categories. Personal pronouns are those where we find contrasts of person . I and we are first person, used to refer to the speaker or a group containing the speaker. (`Speaker' is to be understood as covering the writer in written texts.) You is second person, used to refer to the addressee or a group containing one or more addressees. The others are third person: this doesn't encode reference to speaker or addressee and therefore usually refers to entities other than the speaker or addressee. But I can refer to myself or to you in the third person: The writer has noticed ... ; The reader may recall ...

The personal pronouns have five inflectional forms:

[ 38 ]     i          Nominative                   I , we , you , ...               I did it. It was I who did it.

ii          Accusative                   me , us , you , ...            It bit me . It was me who did it.

iii          Dependent genitive      my , our , your , ...          My son is here. I saw your car .

iv          Independent genitive   mine , ours , yours , ...   Mine was broken. That's mine .

v          Reflexive                      myself , ourselves , ...   I hurt myself . We talk to ourselves .

Nominatives occur mostly as Head of a Subject noun phrase. In formal style they can also occur in certain types of Predicative Complement, with the accusative as a less formal variant: It was I / me who did it . In other types, however, only the accusative is possible: The victim was me , not * The victim was I , and the like. Dependent genitives occur when there is a following Head in the noun phrase, independent ones when there isn't. Reflexives usually relate back to the Subject noun phrase, as in the above examples.

8 ADJECTIVES AND ADJECTIVE PHRASES

8 . 1 Two major functions of adjectives

Most adjectives can be either attributive or predicative :

[ 39 ]     i          Attributive      a hot day , some new DVDs , this excellent play , lonely people

ii          Predicative    It's hot . These look new . I found it excellent . They seem lonely .

Attributive adjectives are pre-head Modifiers in noun phrase structure; predicative adjectives are Predicative Complements in clause structure (see Section5.5). [6]

There are, however, some adjectives that are restricted to one or other of these functions:

[ 40 ]     i          Attributive-only        the main speaker , a mere child , the only problem , my own car

ii          Never-attributive      I'm afraid . She's asleep . He looks content . It's liable to flood.

8 . 2 Gradability and grade

The most central adjectives are gradable : they denote properties that can apply in varying degrees. As such, they can be modified by adverbs of degree and (under conditions relating to length and form) be inflected for comparative (e.g. taller ) and superlative (e.g. tallest ) grade :

[ 41 ]     i          Degree modification     very good , quite hot , rather young , too old , incredibly bad

ii          Inflection for grade       hotter , younger , older , better ; hottest , youngest , oldest , best

Gradable adjectives that don't inflect mark comparative and superlative degree by means of the adverbs more and most respectively: more intelligent , most intelligent .

There are also a good number of adjectives that denote non-scalar properties and hence are non-gradable : alphabetical order , the chief difficulty , the federal government , her right eye , third place . Some adjectives, moreover, can be used in two different senses, one gradable, the other non-gradable (and usually the more basic). In The door is open , for example, open is non-gradable, but in You should be more open with us it is gradable.

8 . 3 The structure of adjective phrases

Adjective phrases consist of an adjective as Head, alone or accompanied by one or more Dependents, which may be Complements or Modifiers:

[ 42 ]     i          Complements  good at chess , grateful for your help , fond of animals , keen on golf ,

glad that you liked it , unsure what had happened , eager to help

ii          Modifiers         very bad , morally wrong , this good , most useful , much better , two

days long , a bit old , cautious to excess , dangerous in the extreme

The Complements are preposition phrases or subordinate clauses; in the former case the adjective selects a particular preposition to head the Complement: fond takes of , keen takes on , and so on. The Modifiers are adverbs (e.g. very ), determinatives ( this ), noun phrases ( two days ) or post-Head prepositional phrases. Adjective phrases containing post-Head Dependents cannot normally be used attributively: He's good at chess , but not * a good at chess schoolboy .

9 ADVERBS AND ADVERB PHRASES.

9 . 1 Adverbs in relation to adjectives

The majority of adverbs are derived from adjectives by adding the suffix @ ly : common - commonly , rare - rarely , etc. There are a good number of adverbs not formed in this way, some of them very common (e.g. almost , always , often , quite , rather , soon , too , very ), but these are normally recognisable as adverbs by virtue of being replaceable by ones with the @ ly suffix: compare It's very good and It's extremely good ; She always wins and She frequently wins ; It'll be over soon and It'll be over shortly , and so on.

The major difference between adverbs and adjectives has to do with their functions. We have seen that adjectives function attributively or predicatively, but adverbs do not normally occur in these functions: compare attributive a successful meeting , not * a successfully meeting , and predicative The meeting was successful , not * The meeting was successfully . Adverbs function as Modifier to a wide range of word or phrase classes, as illustrated in [43], where underlining marks the modifying adverb and capitals what it modifies:

[ 43 ]               Adverb modifying:

  i          Verb                     She SPOKE clearly .                        She PLAYED well .

ii          Adjective              It's a remarkably GOOD play             It looks very GOOD

iii          Adverb                 He spoke virtually INAUDIBLY .        They almost NEVER reply.

iv          Determinative      Nearly ALL copies were sold.            Too FEW copies were printed.

v          Prep phrase         She is completely IN CONTROL.      It's quite BEYOND BELIEF.

vi          Rest of clause     Surprisingly EVERYONE AGREED  Frankly , IT'S USELESS .

In general adverbs that can modify adjectives and other adverbs can also modify verbs, but there are some exceptions, most notably very and too (in the sense `excessively'). Compare He's very FOND of her and * He very LOVES her (we need He loves her very MUCH ).

A few adverbs inflect for grade ( soon , sooner , soonest ), but for the most part comparatives and superlatives are marked by more and most : more carefully , most carefully .

9 . 2 The structure of adverb phrases

The structure of adverb phrases is broadly similar to that of adjective phrases, but simpler: in particular, very few adverbs license complements.

[ 44 ]     i          Complements      Luckily for me , it rained. We handled it similarly to the others .

ii          Modifiers              She sang very well. It won't end that soon. We left a bit late.

10 PREPOSITIONS AND PREPOSITION PHRASES.

The most central members of the preposition class have meanings concerned with relations in time or space: after lunch , at school , before the end , in the garden , off the bridge , on the desk , etc. In this section we look at the function of prepositions and then at their Complements, and finally consider the phenomenon of preposition stranding.

(a) Function of prepositions . Prepositions function as Head in preposition phrases, and these in turn function as Dependent (Complement or Modifier) to any of the four major parts of speech:

[ 45 ]               Prep phrase dependent on:

  i          Verb                              She WENT to London .              They ARE in the garden .

ii          Noun                             He's a MAN of principle .            It's on the WAY to Paris .

iii          Adjective                      She's INTERESTED in politics .  I'm RESPONSIBLE for them

iv          Adverb                          LUCKILY for me , no-one knew. I saw her LATER in the day .

(b) Complements of prepositions . Usually (as in all the examples in [45]) prepositions take a noun phrase as Complement. There are, however, other possibilities:

[ 46 ]     i           Preposition phrase He emerged [ from under the bed .  I'll stay [ until after lunch ].

ii          Adjective phrase     That strikes me [ as unfair ].             I took him [ for dead ].

iii          Adverb phrase         I didn't know [ until recently ].          I can't stay [ for long ].

iv          Clause                      It depends [ on what she says ].      I told her [ before she left ]. [7]

(c) Preposition stranding . In a number of clause constructions the Complement of a preposition is placed at the front of the clause or omitted altogether, leaving the preposition `stranded':

[ 47 ]     i    a.    What are you looking at ?                     b.   It's something [ which I can do without ].

ii    a.    This is the book [ I was referring to ].     b.   He went to the same school as [ I went to ].

The construction is characteristic of relatively informal style, but it is a serious mistake to say that it is grammatically incorrect.

11 NEGATION

(a) Clausal vs subclausal negation . Negation is marked by individual words such as not , no , never , or by affixes such as we have in un common , non -compliant , in frequent , care less , is n't , wo n't , etc. We need to distinguish, however, between cases where the negative affects the whole clause ( clausal negation ) and those where it affects just a part of it ( subclausal negation ):

[ 48 ]     i          Clausal negation           a. He is not well.            b. Surprisingly, he wasn't ill.

ii          Subclausal negation     a. He is unwell.              b. Not surprisingly, he was ill.

The clauses in [i] are negative, but those in [ii] are positive even though they contain a negative element within them. We say this because they behave like obviously positive clauses with respect to the constructions shown in [49]:

[ 49 ]                                   Interrogative tags              And so vs and nor

  i          Positive   a. He is well, isn't he?          b. Surprisingly, he was ill and so was she .

ii          Negative a. He is not well, is he?        b. Surprisingly, he wasn't ill and nor was she.

iii          Positive   a. He is unwell, isn't he?      b. Not surprisingly, he was ill and so was she .

o       In [a] we have a clause followed by an interrogative `tag' used to seek confirmation of what has been said. The usual type of tag reverses the `polarity' of the clause to which it is attached - that is, it is negative if attached to a positive clause, as in [ia], and positive if attached to a negative clause, as in [iia]. And we see from [iiia], therefore, that He is unwell counts as positive since the tag is negative: the clause is no more negative than He is sick .

o       In the [b] examples we have added a truncated clause introduced by and so or and nor . We get and so after a positive clause and and nor after a negative one. And Not surprisingly, he was ill is shown to be a positive clause because it takes and so .

(b) Non-affirmative items . There are a number of words or expressions that occur readily in negative or interrogative clauses but generally not in positive declaratives. Compare:

[ 50 ]                                   Declarative                              Interrogative

  i          Negative a. He didn't find any cracks .      b. Didn't he find any cracks ?

ii          Positive   a. * He found any cracks .            b. Did he find any cracks ?

Instead of [iia] we say He found some cracks . Such items as any in [50] are called non-affirmative (with `affirmative' understood as combining declarative and positive). They include compounds with any @ , such as anybody , anyone , anything , etc., at all , either , ever , yet , budge , can bear , can stand , give a damn , lift a finger , etc. More precisely, these are non-affirmative in at least one of their senses: some of them also have senses in which they can occur in affirmative constructions. The any series of words, for example, can occur in affirmative constructions when the meaning is close to `every', as in Anyone can do that .

12 CLAUSE TYPE AND SPEECH ACTS

We use sentences to make statements, ask questions, make requests, give orders, and so on: these are different kinds of speech act (a term understood, like `speaker', to cover writing as well as speech). The grammatical counterpart is clause type , where we distinguish declarative, interrogative, and so on. The main categories we recognise here are illustrated in [51]:

[ 51 ]     i          Declarative                     You are very tactful.

ii          Closed interrogative      Are you very tactful?

iii          Open interrogative         How tactful are you?

iv          Exclamative                   How tactful you are!

v          Imperative                      Be very tactful.

We use different terms for the clause types than for the speech acts because the relation between the two sets of categories is by no means one-to-one. Consider such examples as [52]:

[ 52 ]     i          You're leaving already?

ii          I ask you again where you were on the evening of 14 July.

iii          I promise to help you.

iv          Would you mind opening the door for me?

Grammatically, [i] is declarative, but it would be used as a question: a question can be marked by rising intonation (or by punctuation) rather than by the grammatical structure. Example [ii] is likewise declarative but again it would be used as a question (perhaps in a court cross-examination): the question force this time comes from the verb ask , in the present tense with a 1st person Subject. Promise in [iii] works in the same way: this example would generally be used to make a promise. This illustrates the point that although we have just a handful of different clause types there are a great many different kinds of speech act: one can apologise, offer, congratulate, beseech, declare a meeting open, and so on. Finally, [iv] is a closed interrogative but would characteristically be used to make a request. In this use it is what is called an indirect speech act : although it is literally a question it actually conveys something else, a polite request.

All canonical clauses are declarative and we need say no more about this type, but a few comments are in order for the remaining four types.

(a) Closed interrogatives . These are so called because they are typically used to ask questions with a closed set of answers. Usually these are Yes and No (or their equivalents), but in examples like Is it a boy or a girl? they derive from the terms joined by or : It's a boy and It's a girl . Grammatically they are marked by Subject-auxiliary inversion (though such inversion is not restricted to interrogatives: in the declarative Never had I felt so embarrassed it is triggered by the initial placement of the negative never ).

(b) Open interrogatives . These are typically used to ask questions with an open set of answers (e.g. very , quite , slightly , etc. in the case of [51iii]). They are marked by the presence of an interrogative phrase consisting of or containing a so-called ` wh -word': who , what , when , where , how , etc. This phrase may be Subject ( Who said that? ), Complement ( What do you want? ) or Adjunct ( When did he leave? ). If it is Complement or Adjunct it normally occurs at the beginning of the clause, which has Subject-auxiliary inversion, as in the last two examples. It is possible, however, for it to remain in post-verbal position, as in And after that you went where ? (a construction most likely to be found in a context of sustained questioning).

(c) Exclamatives . These have, at the front of the clause, an exclamative phrase containing either how , as in [51iv], or what , as in What a fool I've been!

(d) Imperatives . The most common type of imperative has you understood, as in [51v], or expressed as Subject (as in You be careful ; Don't you speak to me like that ). The verb is in the plain form, but do is used in the negative: Don't move . We also have 3rd person imperatives like Somebody open the window , distinguished from the declarative precisely by the plain form verb. 1st person plural imperatives are marked by let's : Let's go! , Don't let's bother .

13 SUBORDINATE CLAUSES

Subordinate clauses normally function in the structure of a phrase or a larger clause. Whereas main clauses are almost invariably finite, subordinate clauses may be finite or non-finite.

13 . 1 Finite subordinate clauses.

The most central type of finite clause is tensed , i.e. contains a verb inflected for tense (preterite or present tense), and most finite subordinate clauses are of this type. There is, however, one construction containing a plain form of the verb that belongs in the finite class, the subjunctive :

[ 53 ]     i          She says that he is kept well-informed                      [tensed: is is present tense verb]

ii          She insists that he be kept well-informed                        [subjunctive: be is plain form]

Subjunctive is thus the name of a syntactic construction, not an inflectional category, as in traditional grammar. It has a plain form verb and when the Subject is a personal pronoun it appears in nominative case.

We distinguish three main types of finite subordinate clause: content clauses , relative clauses and comparative clauses .

13 . 1 . 1 Content clauses

These usually function as Subject or else Complement of a verb, noun, adjective or preposition:

[ 54 ]     i          That they accepted the offer is very fortunate.                                              [Subject]

ii          I KNOW she likes it .                                                                   [Complement of verb]

iii          The FACT that it's so cheap makes me suspicious.                   [Complement of noun]

iv          We stayed in BECAUSE it was raining .                            [Complement of preposition]

Like main clauses they select for clause type, except that there are no subordinate imperatives:

[ 55 ]     i          Declarative                     He didn't know that everybody supported the proposal .

ii          Closed interrogative      He didn't know whether everybody supported the proposal .

iii          Open interrogative         He didn't know which proposal everybody supported .

iv          Exclamative                   He didn't know what a lot of them supported the proposal ..

o       Declaratives are often marked by the subordinator that ; and since that occurs in both the tensed clause and the subjunctive in [53] we include both in the declarative class.

o       Closed interrogatives have whether or if instead of the Subject-auxiliary inversion found in main clauses (compare the main clause counterpart of the subordinate clause in [ii]: Did everybody support the proposal? ).

o       Open interrogatives have the interrogative phrase in initial position and normally no Subject-auxiliary inversion (again compare the main clause counterpart of that in [iii]: Which proposal did everybody support? ).

o       Exclamatives mostly have the same form as their main clause counterparts, as with [iv].

13 . 1 . 2 Relative clauses

(a) Relative clauses as Modifier . The most central kind of relative clauses functions as Modifier in noun phrase structure:

[ 56 ]     i    a.    I agree with [ the guy who spoke last ] .      b.   I agree with [ the guy that spoke last ] .

ii    a.    He lost [ the key which I lent him ] .             b.   He lost [ the key I lent him ] .

Such clauses contain an overt or covert element which relates back to the Head noun, so we understand in [i] that some guy spoke last and in [ii] that I lent him a key. This `relativised element' is overt in [ia] (the relative pronoun who ) and [iia] ( which ), but covert in the [b] examples. This is obvious in the case of [iib], and in [ib] that , although traditionally classified as a relative pronoun, is better regarded as a subordinator, the same one as is found in declarative content clauses like [55i]; on this analysis there is no overt relativised element in [ib] any more than in [iib].

The relativised element can have a variety of functions in the relative clause: in [56i] it is Subject, in [56ii] Object, and so on.

(b) Supplementary relative clauses . The relative clauses in [56] are tightly integrated into the structure of the sentence, but it is also possible for relative clauses to be set off by punctuation or intonation, so that they have the status of more loosely attached Supplements , as in:

[ 57 ]     i          I've lent the car to my brother, who has just come over from New Zealand .

ii          He overslept again, which made him miss the train .

In this type the relativised element is almost always overt, and doesn't relate back to a noun but to a larger unit, a whole noun phrase in [i] ( my brother ) and a clause in [ii], where which is understood as `(the fact) that he overslept again'.

(c) The fused relative construction . This is structurally more complex than the above constructions:

[ 58 ]     i    a.    Whoever wrote this must be very naive.    b.   You can invite who you like .

ii    a.    He quickly spent what she gave him .        b.   What books he has are in the attic.

The underlined sequences here are not themselves clauses but noun phrases: clauses don't denote entities that can be naive or be invited or spent or located in the attic. Note, moreover, that are in [iib] agrees with a plural noun phrase Subject, whereas Subjects with the form of clauses take 3rd person singular verbs, as in [54i]. Whoever in [58ia] is equivalent to the person who and what in [iia] to that which , and so on. This is why we call this construction `fused': the Head of the noun phrase and the relativised element are fused together, instead of being separate, as in [56ia/iia].

These constructions may look superficially like open interrogative content clauses. Compare [58iib], for example, with I asked her what she gave him . The meaning is quite different: the latter, where the underlined clause is interrogative, can be glossed as `I asked her the answer to the question, `What did she give him?'', but there is no such question meaning in [58iia]. Similarly compare [58iib], meaning `The (few) books he has are in the attic', with What books he has is unknown , where the underlined clause is interrogative and the meaning is `The answer to the question `What books does he have?' is unknown'; note that this time the main clause verb is singular is , agreeing with the clausal Subject.

13 . 1 . 3 Comparative clauses

Comparative clauses generally function as Complement to the prepositions as and than :

[ 59 ]     i    a.    I'm as ready as I ever will be .                   b.   As was expected , Sue won easily.

ii    a.    More people came than I'd expected .      b.   He has more vices than he has virtues .

The distinctive property of such clauses is that they are structurally incomplete relative to main clauses: there are elements understood but not overtly expressed. In [ia] and [iia] there's a missing Complement and in [ib] a missing Subject. Even in [iib] there's a missing Dependent in the Object noun phrase, for the comparison is between how many vices he has and how many virtues he has. The fact that there's some kind of understood quantifier here is reflected in the fact that we can't insert an overt one: * He has more vices than he has ten virtues.

13 . 2 Non-finite subordinate clauses

There are three major kinds of non-finite clause:

[ 60 ]     i          Infinitival                  a. He wants to see you .                 b. I can't help you .

ii          Gerund-participial    a. Buying a car was a mistake.       b. He's the guy standing up .

iii          Past-participial        a . All things considered , it's OK.     b. We got told off .

Infinitivals contain a plain form of the verb, with or without the special marker to ; gerund-participials and past-participials have verbs in the gerund-participle and past participle forms; for further examples, see [26] above.

Most non-finite clauses have no overt Subject, but all three kinds allow one under certain conditions.

o       In infinitivals, it occurs in the to -variant with initial for as subordinator: For them to be so late is very unusual .

o       In gerund-participials a personal pronoun Subject usually appears in accusative case, but genitives are found in relatively formal style: We objected to them / their being given extra privileges .

o       Example [iiia] is a past-participial with an overt Subject.

         Infinitivals are much the most frequent of the three classes of non-finite clause, and appear in a very wide range of functions. These include Subject ( To err is human ), Complement of a verb (as in [60ia/b]: the Head verb determines whether to is included), Complement of a noun ( I applaud [ her willingness to compromise ]), Complement of an adjective ( She's [ willing to compromise ]), Adjunct ( She walks to work to keep fit ), Modifier of a noun ( I need [ an album to keep the photos in ]). In general, prepositions take gerund-participials rather than infinitivals as Complement ( He left [ without saying good-bye ]), but the compound in order and so as are exceptions ( She stayed at home [ in order to study for the exam ]).

14 COORDINATION

Coordination is a relation between two or more items of equal syntactic status, the coordinates . They are of equal status in the sense that one is not a Dependent of another.

(a) The marking of coordination. Coordination is usually but not invariably marked by the presence of a coordinator, such as and , or , nor , but ; the first three of these may also be paired with a determinative, both , either and neither respectively. The main patterns are seen in [61]:

[ 61 ]     i          We have no milk and the shops aren't open yet .

ii          Her brother came too , but didn't stay long .

iii          We can meet on Monday , on Thursday or at the week-end .

iv          We can meet on Monday , or on Thursday or at the week-end .

v          Both Jill and her husband attended the meeting.

vi          He was self-confident , determined , egotistical .

Examples [i]-[iii] illustrate the most usual case: a coordinator in the last coordinate. In [iv] there is a coordinator in all non-initial coordinates, in [v] a determinative in the first, and in [vi] no overt marking of coordination at all.

(b) Functional likeness required between coordinates . Coordination can appear at more or less any place in the structure of sentences. You can have coordination between main clauses (giving a compound sentence, as in [61i]), between subordinate clauses, between phrases, between words (e.g. Have you seen my father and mother ? ). But the coordinates need to be grammatically alike. Usually they belong to the same class, as in all the examples in [61]. They do not have to be, however: the crucial constraint is that they be alike in function. Compare, then:

[ 62 ]     i          She is very bright and a good leader .                                                                        

ii          I don't know the cause of the accident or how much damage was done .

iii          *We're leaving Rome and next week .

o       In [i] we have coordination between an adjective phrase and a noun phrase, and in [ii] between a noun phrase and a subordinate clause (an open interrogative content clause). These are acceptable because each coordinate could stand on its own with the same function: in She is very bright and She is a good leader the underlined units are both Predicative Complements, and in I don't know the cause of the accident and I don't know how much damage was done they are both Complements.

o       But [iii] is unacceptable, even though the coordinates are of the same class, noun phrase, because the functional likeness condition is not met. The function of Rome in We're leaving Rome is Complement, whereas that of next week in We're leaving next week is Adjunct.

(c) Joint coordination . One special type of coordination is seen in [63]:

[ 63 ]        a.    Sam and Pat are a happy couple.            b.   Sam Pat and Alex like each other.

What is distinctive about this type is that the properties concerned, being a happy couple and liking each other, apply to the coordinates jointly rather than separately. So we can't say * Sam is a happy couple or * Pat likes each other . The functional likeness in this type is that the coordinates denote members of a set to which the relevant property applies. The construction is more restricted than the type illustrated in [61] in that it excludes determinatives (* Both Sam and Pat are a happy couple ), doesn't allow but as coordinator, and does require likeness of class between the ccoordinates.

15 INFORMATION PACKAGING

The grammar of the clause makes available a number of constructions that enable us to express a given core meaning in different ways depending on how we wish to to present or `package' the information. For example, Kim broke the vase , The vase was broken by Kim , The vase Kim broke, It was Kim who broke the vase , What Kim broke was the vase all have the same core meaning in the sense that there is no situation or context in which one of them would be true and another false (assuming of course that we are talking of the same Kim and the same vase). The first of them, Kim broke the vase , is the syntactically most basic, while the others belong to various information-packaging constructions . The most important of these constructions are illustrated by the underlined examples in [64]:

[ 64 ]               Name                     Example                                    Basic counterpart

  i          Preposing          a. This one you can keep .           b. You can keep this one.

ii          Postposing         a. I've lent to Jill the only copy     b. I've lent the only copy that

                                          that has been corrected .             has been corrected to Jill.

iii          Inversion            a. In the bag was a gold watch .  b. A gold watch was in the bag.

iv          Passive              a. The car was driven by Sue.      b. Sue drove the car.

v          Existential          a. There was a doctor on board . b. A doctor was on board.

vi          Extraposition    a. It's clear that she is ill .              b. That she is ill is clear.

vii          Cleft                   a. It was Kim that suggested it .    b. Kim suggested it.

viii         Pseudo-cleft      a. What I need is a cold drink .      b. I need a cold drink.

ix          Dislocation         a. It's excellent, this curry .            b. This curry is excellent.

         In the first three we are concerned simply with the order of elements, while the others involve more radical changes.

o       The basic position for the Complement this one in [i] is after the verb, but in [a] it is preposed, placed at the front of the clause.

o       In [ii] the basic position for the Object, the only copy that has been corrected , is just after the verb but long or complex elements like this can be postposed, placed at the end.

o       In [iii] the positions of the Subject and Complement of the basic version [b] are reversed in the inversion construction [a]. (More precisely, this is Subject-Dependent inversion, in contrast to the Subject-auxiliary inversion construction discussed earlier. The Dependent is usually a Complement but can also be an Adjunct, as in Three days later came news of her death. )

o       In [iv] (the only one where the basic version has a distinct name, `active') the Object becomes Subject, the Subject becomes Complement of by and the auxiliary be is added.

o       The existential construction applies mainly with the verb be : the basic Subject is displaced to follow the verb and the semantically empty pronoun there takes over the Subject function.

o       In [vib] the Subject is a subordinate clause ( that she is ill ); in [a] this is extraposed, placed after the verb phrase and this time the Subject function is taken over by the pronoun it .

o       In [vii] the cleft clause is formed by dividing the basic version into two parts: one ( Kim ) is highlighted by making it Complement of a clause with it as Subject and be as verb, while the other is backgrounded by relegating it to a subordinate clause (a distinct subtype of relative clause).

o       The pseudo-cleft construction is similar, but this time the subordinated part is put in a fused relative ( what I need ) functioning as Subject of be .

o       Dislocation belongs to fairly informal style. It differs from the basic version in having an extra noun phrase, set apart intonationally and related to a pronoun in the main Subject-Predicate part of the clause. In the left dislocation variant the pronoun occurs to the left of the noun phrase; in right dislocation it is the other way round, as in His father, she can't stand him .

There are two further comments that should be made about these constructions.

(a) Basic counterpart need not be canonical . For convenience we have chosen examples in [64] where the basic counterparts are all canonical clauses, but of course they do not need to be. The basic (active) counterpart of passive Was the car driven by Kim? is Did Kim drive the car? , which is non-canonical by virtue of being interrogative. Likewise the non-cleft counterpart of It was Sue who had been interviewed by the police is Sue had been interviewed by the police , which is non-canonical by virtue of being passive: note then that certain combinations of the information-packaging constructions are possible.

(b) The information-packaging construction may be the only option . The second point is that under certain circumstances what one would expect to be the basic counterpart is in fact ungrammatical. Thus we can say There was an accident , but not * An accident was : here the existential construction is the only option. One difference between actives and passives is that the by phrase of the passive is an optional element whereas the element that corresponds to it in the active, namely the Subject, is generally obligatory in finite clauses. Compare, then:

[ 65 ]     i          Passive    a. Some mistakes were made by Ed.    b. Some mistakes were made.

ii          Active        a. Ed made some mistakes.                 b. * Made some mistakes.

Passives like [ib] - called short passives - thus have no active counterpart. They are in fact the more common type of passive, allowing information to be omitted that would have to be expressed in the active construction.

[1] Written by Rodney Huddleston & Geoffrey K. Pullum in collaboration with a team of thirteen linguists and published by Cambridge University Press in 2002. A shorter version, designed as an undergraduate textbook, appeared in 2005 as A Student's Introduction to English Grammar . I am grateful to Geoff Pullum and Anne Horan for comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

[2] In my Words'Worth paper I relied simply on the convention of upper vs lower case initial to distinguish `determiner' as a class term and `Determiner' as a function term.

[3] We use bold italics for lexemes; lexeme is a more abstract concept than word as it ignores inflection, so that do , does , did , etc. are all forms of a single lexeme, do .

[4] Traditional grammar also classifies as participles verb-forms which it regards (mistakenly, in our view) as part of a compound verb, such as checking in She was checking the figures (cf. Section6.3.3).

[5] In fact there is divided usage here, and some speakers do allow may in this construction. For them it would seem that may and might are no longer treated as present and preterite forms of a single lexeme, but as present tense forms of distinct lexemes.

[6] This is the standard terminology, but note that Functional Grammar uses `Attribute' for the most common type of Predicative Complement.

[7] In traditional grammar it is not she left but before she left that is analysed as a clause, with before being here a subordinating conjunction rather than a preposition. We present arguments in favour of our analysis on pp. 1011-14 and 129-30 respectively of the two books mentioned in footnote 1. We also depart from traditional grammar in treating words like those underlined in Come in or I fell off as prepositions rather than adverbs.

English Syntax: An Introduction

Focusing on the descriptive facts of English, this textbook provides a systematic introduction to English syntax for students with no prior knowledge of English grammar or syntactic analysis. English Syntax  helps students appreciate the various sentence patterns available in the language, understand insights into the core data of its syntax, develop analytic abilities to explore patterns of English in more depth, and learn precise ways of formalizing syntactic analysis. The text and exercises cover a variety of English data and major constructions such as agreement, raising and control, the auxiliary system, passive, questions, relative clauses, extraposition, and clefts.

“This book is an excellent text that takes nothing for granted. Even the complete novice can use this book to gain familiarity with some of the most subtle and interesting problems of English syntax.”  —Ivan A. Sag, Stanford University

“This is a valuable introductory syntax volume, which strikes a nice balance between data and theory, and leads the student from the most basic notions of syntax to an understanding of analyses of a broad range of English constructions within the HPSG framework.”  —Robert D.  Borsley, University of Essex

Jong-Bok Kim  is Associate Professor in the School of English at Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea. 

Peter Sells  is Professor of Linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

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What is Syntax? Definition, Examples of English Syntax

Home » The Writer’s Dictionary » What is Syntax? Definition, Examples of English Syntax

Syntax definition: Syntax is the grammatical structure of words and phrases to create coherent sentences.

What is syntax?

What does syntax mean? Syntax is the grammatical structure of sentences. The format in which words and phrases are arranged to create sentences is called syntax.

Let’s look at an example of how a sentence can be rearranged to create varied syntax.

Examples of Syntax in a Sentence:

• The boy jumped happily .
• The boy happily jumped.
• Happily , the boy jumped.

A writer will vary sentence syntax to make writing more interesting or to emphasize a particular point.

Words and phrases must follow English rules for correct arrangement and coherent sentences.

Syntax vs. Diction: What’s the Difference?

Syntax and diction are different concepts in grammar and in literature.

What is syntax? Syntax is the arrangement of words that make a sentence.

What is diction? Diction is word choice.

• The boy jumped happily.
• The girl sang beautifully.
• The dog barked loudly.

Each of these sentences has the same syntax. Each sentence follows the structure of subject-verb-adverb. However, each sentence uses different diction (word choice).

The following examples have similar diction but different syntax.

• The boy happily

Each of these sentences has the same diction. Each sentence uses the same four words. However, each sentence has different word order to create different syntax.

In other words, diction and syntax focus on different things. Diction focuses on word choice, while syntax focuses on the order and structure of those words.

Proper Syntax in English Sentences

Below are a few examples of different types of syntax in English. Each of these examples has different syntax.

Simple sentences follow a subject-verb format.

Simple Syntax Examples:

• The boy jumped.
• The girl sang.

Compound sentences have more than one subject or verb.

Compound Syntax Examples:

• The boy jumped and the girl sang.
• I did not go to the concert but I went to the fair.

Complex sentences contain a subordinating clause.

Complex Syntax Examples:

• The boy jumped even though he was nervous.
• Because she was excited, the girl sang.

Compound-complex sentences contain two independent clauses and more dependent clauses.

Compound-complex Syntax Examples:

• Even though he was nervous, the boy jumped and he landed across the stream.
• The girl sang and the woman shrieked because they were excited.

Read more on English sentence structure .

Parallel Structure in Sentences

In English, parallel structure is most often an issue when creating a series list. Therefore, we will look at an example of appropriate parallel structure through lists.

Correct example:

• I like running, jumping, and hiking.

In this example, three gerunds are used (running, jumping, hiking) to create the grammatically correct list.

Incorrect example:

• I like to run, jumping, and hiking.

In this example, “to run” and “jumping” and “hiking” are not parallel. “To run” is an infinitive and “jumping” and “hiking” are gerunds . This sentence is grammatically incorrect and this sentence does not have proper syntax.

Summary: What is Syntax in Literature?

Define syntax : the definition of syntax is,

• the arrangement of words and phrases to create sentences
• a way for writers to express creativity and create interest
• a balance of words that must be parallel to be grammatically correct

English Syntax

An Introduction

Focusing on the descriptive facts of English, this textbook provides a systematic introduction to English syntax for students with no prior knowledge of English grammar or syntactic analysis.

English Syntax helps students appreciate the various sentence patterns available in the language, understand insights into the core data of its syntax, develop analytic abilities to explore patterns of English in more depth, and learn precise ways of formalizing syntactic analysis. The text and exercises cover a variety of English data and major constructions such as agreement, raising and control, the auxiliary system, passive, questions, relative clauses, extraposition, and clefts.

“This book is an excellent text that takes nothing for granted. Even the complete novice can use this book to gain familiarity with some of the most subtle and interesting problems of English syntax.” —Ivan A. Sag, Stanford University

“This is a valuable introductory syntax volume, which strikes a nice balance between data and theory, and leads the student from the most basic notions of syntax to an understanding of analyses of a broad range of English constructions within the HPSG framework.” —Robert D.  Borsley, University of Essex

Jong-Bok Kim is Associate Professor in the School of English at Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea. Peter Sells is Professor of Linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

• Acknowledgments
• 1 Some Basic Properties of English Syntax
• 1.1 Some Remarks on the Essence of Human Language
• 1.2 How We Discover Rules
• 1.3 Why Do We Study Syntax and What Is It Good for?
• 1.4 Exercises
• 2 From Words to Major Phrase Types
• 2.1 Introduction
• 2.2 Lexical Categories
• 2.2.1 Determining the Lexical Categories
• 2.2.2 Grammar with Lexical Categories
• 2.3 Phrasal Categories
• 2.4 Phrase Structure Rules
• 2.4.1 NP: Noun Phrase
• 2.4.2 VP: Verb Phrase
• 2.4.3 AP: Adjective Phrase
• 2.4.4 AdvP: Adverb Phrase
• 2.4.5 PP: Preposition Phrase
• 2.5 Grammar with Phrases
• 2.6 Exercises
• 3 Syntactic, Forms, Grammatical Functions, and Semantic Roles
• 3.1 Introduction
• 3.2 Grammatical Functions
• 3.2.1 Subjects
• 3.2.2 Direct and Indirect Objects
• 3.2.3 Predicative Complements
• 3.2.4 Oblique Complements
• 3.2.5 Modifiers
• 3.3 Form and Function Together
• 3.4 Semantic Roles
• 3.5 Exercises
• 4 Head, Complements, and Modifiers
• 4.1 Projections from Lexical Heads to Phrases
• 4.1.1 Internal vs. External Syntax
• 4.1.2 Notion of Head, Complements, and Modifiers
• 4.2 Differences between Complements and Modifiers
• 4.3 PS Rules, X′-Rules, and Features
• 4.4 Lexicon and Feature Structures
• 4.4.1 Feature Structures and Basic Operations
• 4.4.2 Feature Structures for Linguistic Entities
• 4.4.3 Argument Realization
• 4.4.4 Verb Types and Argument Structure
• 4.5 Exercises
• 5 More on Subjects and Complements
• 5.1 Grammar Rules and Principles
• 5.2 Feature Specifications on the Complement Values
• 5.2.1 Complements of Verbs
• 5.2.2 Complements of Adjectives
• 5.2.3 Complements of Common Nouns
• 5.3 Feature Specifications for the Subject
• 5.4 Clausal Complement or Subject
• 5.4.1 Verbs Selecting a Clausal Complement
• 5.4.2 Verbs Selecting a Clausal Subject
• 5.4.3 Adjectives Selecting a Clausal Complement
• 5.4.4 Nouns Selecting a Clausal Complement
• 5.4.5 Prepositions Selecting a Clausal Complement
• 5.5 Excercises
• 6 Noun Phrases and Agreement
• 6.1 Classification of Nouns
• 6.2 Syntactic Structures
• 6.2.1 Common Nouns
• 6.2.2 Pronouns
• 6.2.3 Proper Nouns
• 6.3 Agreement Types and Morpho-syntactic Features
• 6.3.1 Noun-Determiner Agreement
• 6.3.2 Pronoun-Antecedent Agreement
• 6.3.3 Subject-Verb Agreement
• 6.4 Semantic Agreement Features
• 6.5 Paritive NPs and Agreement
• 6.5.1 Basic Properties
• 6.5.2 Two Types of Partitive NPs
• 6.5.3 Measure Noun Phrases
• 6.6 Modifying an NP
• 6.6.1 Adjectives as Prenominal Modifiers
• 6.6.2 Postnominal Modifiers
• 6.7 Exercises
• 7 Raising and Control Constructions
• 7.1 Raising and Control Predicates
• 7.2 Differences between Raising and Control Verbs
• 7.2.1 Subject Raising and Control
• 7.2.2 Object Raising and Control
• 7.3 A Simple Transformational Approach
• 7.4 A Nontransformational Approach
• 7.4.1 Identical Syntactic Structures
• 7.4.2 Differences in Subcategorization
• 7.4.3 Mismatch between Meaning and Structure
• 7.5 Explaining the Differences
• 7.5.1 Expletive Subject and Object
• 7.5.2 Meaning and Preservation
• 7.5.3 Subject vs. Object Control Verbs
• 7.6 Exercises
• 8 Auxiliary Constructions
• 8.1 Basic Issues
• 8.2 Transformational
• 8.3 A Non-Transformational Analysis
• 8.3.1 Modals
• 8.3.2 Be and Have
• 8.3.3 Periphrasic do
• 8.3.4 Infinitival Clause Marker to
• 8.4 Explaining the NICE Properties
• 8.4.1 Auxiliaries with Negation
• 8.4.2 Auxiliaries with Inversion
• 8.4.3 Contracted Auxiliaries
• 8.4.4 Auxiliaries with Ellipsis
• 8.5 Exercises
• 9 Passive Constructions
• 9.1 Introduction
• 9.2 Relationships between Active and Passive
• 9.3 Approaches to Passive
• 9.3.1 From Structural Description to Structural Change
• 9.3.2 A Transformational Approach
• 9.3.3 A Lexicalist Approach
• 9.4 Prepositional Passives
• 9.5 Exercises
• 10 Wh-Questions
• 10.1 Clausal Types and Interrogatives
• 10.2 Movement vs. Feature Percolation
• 10.3 Feature Percolation with No Abstract Elements
• 10.3.1 Basic Systems
• 10.3.2 Non-Subject Wh-Questions
• 10.3.3 Subject Wh-Questions
• 10.4 Indirect Questions
• 10.4.1 Basic Structures
• 10.4.2 Non-Wh Indirect Questions
• 10.4.3 Infinitival Indirect Questions
• 10.4.4 Adjunct Wh-questions
• 10.5 Exercises
• 11 Relative Clause Constructions
• 11.1 Introduction
• 11.2 Non-Subject Wh -Relative Clauses
• 11.3 Subject Relative Clauses
• 11.4 That-relative clauses
• 11.5 Infinitival and Bare Relative Clauses
• 11.6 Restrictive vs. Nonrestrictive Relattive Clauses
• 11.7 Constraints on the GAP
• 11.8 Exercises
• 12 Special Constructions
• 12.1 Introduction
• 12.2 ‘Easy’ Constructions
• 12.2.1 Basic Properties
• 12.2.2 Transformational Analysis
• 12.2.3 A Lexicalist Analysis
• 12.3 Extraposition
• 12.3.1 Basic Properties
• 12.3.2 Transformational Analysis
• 12.3.3 A Lexicalist Analysis
• 12.4 Cleft Constructions
• 12.4.1 Basic Properties
• 12.4.2 Distributional Properties of the Three Clefts
• 12.4.3 Syntactic Structures of the Three Types of Cleft: Movement Analyses
• 12.4.4 A Lexicalist Analysis
• 12.5 Exercises

English Language Sentence Structure

How Meaning Is Derived From the Syntax of a Sentence

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

In English grammar, sentence structure is the arrangement of words, phrases, and clauses in a sentence. The grammatical function or meaning of a sentence is dependent on this structural organization, which is also called syntax or syntactic structure.

In traditional grammar, the four basic types of sentence structures are the simple sentence, the compound sentence, the complex sentence, and the compound-complex sentence.

The most common word order in English sentences is Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) . When reading a sentence, we generally expect the first noun to be the subject and the second noun to be the object. This expectation (which isn't always fulfilled) is known in linguistics as the " canonical sentence strategy."

Examples and Observations

One of the first lessons learned by the student of language or linguistics is that there is more to language than a simple vocabulary list. To learn a language, we must also learn its principles of sentence structure, and a linguist who is studying a language will generally be more interested in the structural principles than in the vocabulary per se."—Margaret J. Speas

"Sentence structure may ultimately be composed of many parts, but remember that the foundation of each sentence is the subject and the predicate. The subject is a word or a group of words that functions as a noun; the predicate is at least a verb and possibly includes objects and modifiers of the verb." —Lara Robbins

Meaning and Sentence Structure

"People are probably not as aware of sentence structure as they are of sounds and words, because sentence structure is abstract in a way that sounds and words are not . . . At the same time, sentence structure is a central aspect of every sentence . . . We can appreciate the importance of sentence structure by looking at examples within a single language. For instance, in English, the same set of words can convey different meanings if they are arranged in different ways. Consider the following:

• The senators objected to the plans proposed by the generals.
• The senators proposed the plans objected to by the generals.

The meaning of [first] the sentence is quite different from that of [the second], even though the only difference is the position of the words objected to and proposed . Although both sentences contain exactly the same words, the words are structurally related to each other differently; it is those differences in structure that account for the difference in meaning." —Eva M. Fernández and Helen Smith Cairns

Information Structure: The Given-Before-New Principle

"It has been known since the Prague School of Linguistics that sentences can be divided into a part that anchors them in the preceding discourse ('old information') and a part that conveys new information to the listener. This communicative principle may be put to good use in the analysis of sentence structure by taking the boundary between old and new information as a clue to identifying a syntactic boundary. In fact, a typical SVO sentence such as Sue has a boyfriend can be broken down into the subject, which codes the given information, and the remainder of the sentence, which provides the new information. The old-new distinction thus serves to identify the VP [ verb phrase ] constituent in SVO sentences." —Thomas Berg

Producing and Interpreting Sentence Structures in Speech

"The grammatical structure of a sentence is a route followed with a purpose, a phonetic goal for a speaker, and a semantic goal for a hearer. Humans have a unique capacity to go very rapidly through the complex hierarchically organized processes involved in speech production and perception. When syntacticians draw structure on sentences they are adopting a convenient and appropriate shorthand for these processes. A linguist's account of the structure of a sentence is an abstract summary of a series of overlapping snapshots of what is common to the processes of producing and interpreting the sentence."—James R. Hurford

The Most Important Thing to Know About Sentence Structure

"Linguists investigate sentence structure by inventing sentences, making small changes to them, and watching what happens. This means that the study of language belongs to the scientific tradition of using experiments to understand some part of our world. For example, if we make up a sentence (1) and then make a small change to it to get (2), we find that the second sentence is ungrammatical.

(1) I saw the white house. (Grammatically correct)

(2) I saw the house white. (Grammatically incorrect)

"Why? One possibility is that it relates to the words themselves; perhaps the word white and the word house must always come in this order. But if we were to explain in this way we would need separate explanations for a very large number of words, including the words in the sentences (3)-(6), which show the same pattern.

(3) He read the new book. (Grammatically correct)

(4) He read the book new. (Grammatically incorrect)

(5) We fed some hungry dogs. (Grammatically correct)

(6) We fed some dogs hungry. (Grammatically incorrect)

"These sentences show us that whatever principle gives us the order of words, it must be based on the class of word, not on a specific word. The words white, new , and hungry are all a class of word called an adjective ; the words house, book , and dogs are all a class of word called a noun. We could formulate a generalization, which holds true for the sentences in (1)-(6):

(7) An adjective cannot immediately follow a noun.

"A generalization [as with sentence 7] is an attempt to explain the principles by which a sentence is put together. One of the useful consequences of a generalization is to make a prediction which can then be tested, and if this prediction turns out to be wrong, then the generalization can be improved . . . The generalization in (7) makes a prediction which turns out to be wrong when we look at sentence (8).

(8) I painted the house white. (Grammatically correct)

"Why is (8) grammatical while (2) is not, given that both end on the same sequence of house white ? The answer is the most important thing to know about sentence structure: The grammaticality of a sentence depends not on the sequence of words but how the words are combined into phrases."—Nigel Fabb

• Speas, Margaret J. "Phrase Structure in Natural Language." Kluwer, 1990
• Robbins, Lara. "Grammar and Style at Your Fingertips." Alpha Books, 2007
• Fernández, Eva M. and Cairns, Helen Smith. "Fundamentals of Psycholinguistics." Wiley-Blackwell, 2011
• Berg, Thomas. "Structure in Language: A Dynamic Perspective." Routledge, 2009
• Hurford, James R. "The Origins of Grammar: Language in the Light of Evolution II." Oxford University Press, 2011
• Fabb, Nigel. "Sentence Structure, Second Edition." Routledge, 2005
• The 9 Parts of Speech: Definitions and Examples
• What Is a Phrase? Definition and Examples in Grammar
• Definition and Examples of Syntax
• English Grammar
• Generative Grammar: Definition and Examples
• The Rules of English
• What Is Parsing? Definition and Examples in English Grammar
• surface structure (generative grammar)
• How to Diagram a Sentence
• Constituent: Definition and Examples in Grammar
• Linguistic Competence: Definition and Examples
• Lexis Definition and Examples
• Argument Structure in English Grammar
• Sentence Parts and Sentence Structures
• Given-Before-New Principle (Linguistics)
• What Is Recursion in English Grammar?

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Analysing English Sentences

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Andrew Radford has acquired an unrivalled reputation over the past thirty years for writing syntax textbooks in which difficult concepts are clearly explained without the excessive use of technical jargon. Analysing English Sentences continues in this tradition, offering a well-structured introduction to English syntax and contemporary syntactic theory which is supported throughout with learning aids such as summaries, lists of key hypotheses and principles, extensive references, handy hints and exercises. Instructors will also benefit from the book's free online resources,…

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Key features

• Workbook sections enable students to gain hands-on experience in analysing specific phenomena
• An extensive glossary provides students who have little or no linguistic background with a clear explanation of traditional and contemporary grammatical terminology
• Accompanying online materials, including PowerPoint materials and an answer key, are an invaluable resource for instructors

About the book

• DOI https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511980312
• Series Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics
• Subjects English Language and Linguistics: General Interest, Grammar and Syntax, Language and Linguistics
• Publication date: 04 August 2016
• ISBN: 9780521669702
• Dimensions (mm): 247 x 174 mm
• Weight: 1.16kg
• Page extent: 592 pages
• Availability: Available
• ISBN: 9780521660082
• Weight: 1.31kg
• Publication date: 28 May 2018
• ISBN: 9780511980312

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Andrew Radford is Emeritus Professor at the University of Essex. His popular textbooks include An Introduction to English Sentence Structure (2009), Minimalist Syntax (2004) and Syntactic Theory and the Structure of English (1997), all published by Cambridge University Press.

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This highly successful text has long been considered a standard introduction to the practical analysis of English sentence structure. As in previous editions, key concepts such as constituency, category and function are carefully explained as they are introduced. Tree diagrams are used throughout to help the reader visualise the hierarchical structure of sentences. The final chapter sets the analysis in the context of generative grammar.

In this third edition , Analysing Sentences has been thoroughly revised. It has an attractive new layout, more examples, clearer explanations and summaries of major points. A major change concerns the analysis of auxiliary verbs, which has been revised to bring it more in line with current thinking.

Clear development from chapter to chapter, together with the author’s accessible style, make this book suitable for readers with no previous experience of sentence analysis. A practical and reader-friendly text, it includes many in-text exercises and end-of-chapter exercises, all with answers, and Further Exercises, making it suitable for self-directed study as well as for taught courses.

Noel Burton-Roberts is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University.  He is the author of The Limits to Debate: a Revised Theory of Semantic Presupposition (CUP 1989), the editor of Phonological Knowledge: Conceptual and Empirical Issues (OUP 2000) and Pragmatics (Palgrave, 2007), and the author of numerous articles on various aspects of linguistics and the English language.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter | 5  pages, introduction, chapter 1 | 18  pages, sentence structure: constituents, chapter 2 | 22  pages, sentence structure: functions, chapter 3 | 21  pages, sentence structure: categories 47, chapter 4 | 20  pages, the basic verb phrase, chapter 5 | 24  pages, adverbials and other matters, chapter 6 | 30  pages, more on verbs: auxiliary vps, chapter 7 | 30  pages, the structure of noun phrases, chapter 8 | 25  pages, sentences within sentences, chapter 9 | 28  pages, chapter 10 | 30  pages, part i: the form of non-finite clauses, chapter 11 | 15  pages, languages, sentences and grammars.

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3 Overview of English Syntax

The order in which words and phrases occur matters. Syntax is the set of conventions of language that specify whether a given sequence of words is well-formed and what functional relations, if any, pertain to them. For example, in English, the sequence “cat the mat on” is not well-formed. To keep the set conventions manageable, and to reflect how native speakers use their language, syntax is defined hierarchically and recursively. The structures include words (which are the smallest well-formed units), phrases (which are legal sequences of words), clauses and sentences (which are both legal sequences of phrases). Sentences can be combined into compound sentences using conjunctions, such as “and”.

The categories of words used for NLP are mostly similar to those used in other contexts, but in some cases they may be different from  how you were taught when you were learning the grammar of English. One of the challenges faced in NLP work is that terminology for describing syntax has evolved over time and differs somewhat across disciplines. If one were to ask how many categories of words are there, the writing center at a university might say there are eight different types of parts of speech in the English language: noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection [1] . The folks who watched Schoolhouse Rock also were taught there were eight, but a slightly different set [2] .  By contrast,  the first published guideline for annotating part of speech created by linguists used eighty different categories [3] . Most current NLP work uses around 35 labels for different parts of speech, with additional labels for punctuation.

The conventions for describing syntax arise from two disciplines: studies by linguists, going back as far as 8th century BCE by the first Sanskrit grammarians, and work by computational scientists, who have standardized and revised the labeling of syntactic units to better meet the needs of automated processing. What forms a legal constituent in a given language was once determined qualitatively and empirically: early linguists would review written documents, or interview native speakers of language, to find out what phrases native speakers find acceptable and what phrases or words can be substituted for one another and still be considered grammatical. This technique is still useful today as a means of verifying the syntactic labels of rarely seen expressions. For example, in the sentence “I would rather deal with the side effects of my medication”, one might wonder if “with” is part of a complex verb “deal with” or it acts as a preposition, which is a function word more associated with the noun phrase “the side effects”. The fact that we can substitute the verb  “tolerate” for “deal with” is evidence that “deal with” is a single entity.

There is always some risk of experimental bias when we depend on the judgements of untrained native speakers to define the legal structures of a language. As an alternative,  there have been attempts to use evidence of language structure obtained directly from physical monitoring of people’s  eyes (via eye tracking) or brains (via event-related potentials measured by electroencephalograms) while they process language. Although  such physiological evidence is less subject to bias, the cost of the equipment and the difficulty of using it has limited the scale of such studies. Moreover, both of these physiological approaches rely on experts to hypothesize about the structure of language, conduct experiments to elicit human behavior, and then generalize from a relatively small set of observations.

3.1 The Role of Corpora in Understanding Syntax

Today, best practice for many subtasks of natural language processing involves working with large collections of text, each of which comprises “a corpus”. Early on in the advent of computers, some researchers surmised the importance of collecting unsolicited examples of naturally occurring text and performing quantitative analyses to inform our understanding. In the  1960’s, linguists from Brown University created the first “large” collection of text [4] . This collection is known as the Brown Corpus. It includes 500 samples of English-language text, totaling roughly one million words, compiled from works published in the United States in 1961. The words of the corpus were then annotated with part-of-speech labels, using a combination of automated labeling and laborious hand correction [5] . Although this corpus is no longer considered large, it still provides a useful benchmark for many studies and is available for use within popular NLP tools such as NLTK (with updated part-of-speech tags). Also, the technique of combining automated processing and manual correction is still often necessary.

The second large-scale collection and annotation of  natural language data began in the early 1990’s with a project conducted by a team at the University of Pennsylvania, led by a Computer Scientist, Mitchell Marcus, an expert in automated sentence processing. This data set is called “the Penn Treebank” (PTB), and is the most widely used resource for NLP. This work benefited from a donation of three years of Wall Street Journal (WSJ) text (containing 98,732 news stories representing over 1.2 million word-level tokens), along with past efforts to annotate the words of the Brown Corpus with part-of-speech tags. Today, the PTB  also includes annotations for the “Switchboard” corpus of transcribed spoken conversation. Switchboard includes about 2,400 two-sided telephone conversations, previously collected by Texas Instruments in the early 1990’s [6] . However, the WSJ subset of the Penn treebank corpus is still among the largest and most widely used data sets for NLP work. The word-level categories used in the PTB are very similar to those previously used by linguists, but with changes to suit the task at hand: labels were chosen to be short, but also easy for annotators to remember. Special categories were added for proper nouns, numbers, auxiliaries, pronouns, and three subtypes of wh-words, along with common variants for tense and number.

Another important English language resource is the English Web Treebank [7] , completed in 2012.  It has 254,830 word-level tokens (16,624 sentences) of web text that has been manually annotated with part-of-speech tags and constituency structure in the same style as the PTB.  The corpus spans five types of web text: blog posts, newsgroup threads, emails, product reviews, and answers from question-answer websites. It has also been annotated with dependency structures, in the style used in the Stanford dependency parser [8] .

The most recent widely used  English language corpus is OntoNotes Release 5.0, completed in 2013. It is a collection of about 2.9 million words of text spread across three languages (Arabic, Chinese, and English) [9] . The text spans the domains of news, conversational telephone speech, weblogs, Usenet newsgroups, broadcast, and talk shows.  It follow the same labelling conventions used in the Penn Treebank, and also adds annotations based on PropBank, which describe the semantic arguments associated with verbs. OntoNotes has been used to pretrain language models included in the spaCy NLP software libraries [10] . It includes words that did not exist when the Penn Treebank was created such as “Google” [11] . Another large, but less well known corpus, is the Open American National Corpus (OANC) which is a collection of 15 million words of American English, including texts spanning a variety of genres and transcripts of spoken data produced from 1990 through 2015. The OANC data and annotations are fully open and unrestricted for any use. [12] . Another well-known, large annotated collection of newswire next is Gigaword [13] .

Terminology for describing language has become more standardized with the availability of  larger corpora and more accurate tools for automated processing. Today, nearly every form of human communication is available in digital form, which allows us to to analyze large sets of sentences, spanning  a wide variety of genres, including professional writing in newspapers and journal articles, informal writing posted to social media, and transcripts of spoken conversations and government proceedings. Large subsets of these texts have been annotated with grammatical information. With this data, the existence of linguistic structures and their distribution has been measured with statistical methods. This annotated data also  makes it possible to create algorithms to analyze many sentences automatically and (mostly accurately) without hand-crafting a grammar.

For NLP analysis, there are four aspects of syntax that are most important: the syntactic categories and features of individual words, which we also call their parts of speech; the well-formed sequences of words into phrases and sentences, which we call constituency; the requirements that some words have for other co-occurring constituents, which we call subcategorization; and binary relations between words that are the lexical heads (main word) of a constituent, which we call lexical dependency, or just “dependency”. In this chapter, we will discuss each of these four aspects. Along with our discussion of the parts of speech, we will consider part-of-speech tags, which are the labels that  NLP systems use to designate combinations of the syntactic category of a word and  its syntactic features. (Some systems also use a record structure  with separate fields for each feature, as an internal structure, but specialized tags are more compact for use in annotated datasets.)

3.2 Word Types and Features

3.2.1 nouns, pronouns, and proper nouns.

Nouns are used to name or describe entities, which might be physical (such as  “cat” or “rock”) or abstract (such as “freedom” or “laughter”) or both (such as “city” or “company”). Nouns can be singular or plural. The plural form is usually marked with the suffix “s” or “es”, as in “cats”; if a word ends in “y”, it is changed to “i” before adding the suffix. Figure 3.1 includes several examples. Some plurals are irregular, as in “children” or “knives”.  Figure 3.2 includes examples of irregular nouns. Some nouns (called “count” nouns), unless they are plural, require a determiner or cardinal number to specify the denoted set, e.g. “the boy” or “three boys”. Nouns occur in the subjects of sentences and as objects following a verb or preposition. Figure 3.3 shows the typical placement of nouns within a simple sentence.

There are some subtypes of nouns,  namely proper nouns and pronouns, that are so different  from common nouns that annotation for NLP treats them as separate categories, although they occur in similar contexts.

Proper nouns   are the names of people, places, and things and are capitalized wherever they occur, as in “My name is Susan”. Proper nouns rarely appear as plurals, but since they sometimes do, as in “We visited the Smiths”,  NLP systems include a category for plural proper nouns.

Pronouns are used to refer to people and things that have been mentioned before or presupposed to exist. They have different forms to specify whether they are singular or plural and their syntactic role (subject or object). In a grammatical sentence, the form should agree with the properties of the verb, although current NLP systems often ignore these features and only use only one category. One subclass of pronouns that is distinguished are those that express possession, and can be used in place of a determiner, e.g., “my book” or “your house,”  and this subclass may also be assigned a separate part of speech. Also, some pronouns are used to form a question and thus also merit their own labels. They include both regular wh-pronouns, including “what”, “who”, and “whom,” and possessive wh-pronouns, such as “whose”.

Common nouns and proper nouns are considered an open class of words, which means people may invent new ones to describe new objects or names. By contrast, pronouns are considered a closed class of words. With open-class words, algorithms must address that new items might occur that will be outside of the known vocabulary.

3.2.2 Determiners

Determiners include “the”, “a”, “an”, “that”,  “these”, “this”, and “those”. There are also determiners that are used in questions, such as “what” and “which”. Determiners only occur in noun phrases, before any adjectives or nouns. Some common nouns, when they express a mass quantity, like “water” or “rice”, or when they are plural like “cats”, do not require a determiner. Proper nouns generally do not allow a determiner, except when they are plural, e.g., “The Smiths” or when it is part of the name itself, e.g., “The Ohio State University”. Possessive phrases, which are marked with an apostrophe and the suffix “-s”, can take the place of a determiner, as in the phrase “my mother’s house”. Pronouns, regular or possessive, are never preceded by determiners. Determiners are considered a closed class of words.

3.2.3 Verbs and Auxiliary Verbs

Verbs are usually tensed (past, present, future). They include both verbs where the tensed forms are regular (see Figure 3.4) or irregular (see Figure 3.5).  Also,  in some contexts, verbs can appear untensed, such as after an auxiliary or after the word “to”. Verbs are also marked for number (singular or plural), and for person.   First person is “I”; second person is “you”; and third person is “he”, “she”, or “it”. The third-person singular form is marked with “-s”; the non-3rd person singular present looks the same as the root form. Verbs also have participle forms for past (eg., “broken” or “thought”) and present (e.g., “thinking”).

Some verbs require a particle which is similar to a preposition except that it forms an essential part of the meaning of the verb that can be moved either before or after another argument, as in “she took off her hat” or “she took her hat off”.

Verbs that can be main verbs are an open class. Verbs that are modals or auxiliary verbs (also called helping verbs) are a closed class . They are used along with a main verb to express ability (“can”, “could”), possibility (“may”, “might”), necessity (“shall”, “should”, “ought”), certainty (“do”, “did”), future (“will”, “would”), past (“has”, “had”, “have”, “was”, “were”). NLP systems treat modals and auxiliaries as a separate part of speech. They are also all irregular in the forms that they take for different combinations of features, such as past, plural, etc. For example, the modal “can” uses the form “can” for any value for number and “could” for any value for “past”.

3.2.4 Prepositions

Prepositions, such as “with”, “of”, “for”, and “from” are words that relate two nouns or a noun and a verb. Prepositions require a noun phrase argument (to form a prepositional phrase). It is estimated that there about 150 different prepositions (including 94 one-word prepositions and 56 complex prepositions, such as “out of”) [14] . Prepositions are generally considered a closed class, but the possibility of complex combinations suggests that algorithms might be better off allowing for out of vocabulary examples.

3.2.5 Adjectives and Adverbs

Adjectives normally modify nouns, as in “the big red book”, but may also be an argument of a verb (including forms of “be”, “feel”, “appear”,   and “become”). Adjectives can also be marked as comparative (meaning “more than typical”, using the suffix “-er”) or superlative (meaning “more than any others”, using the suffix “-est”). Adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. They express manner or intensity. They may be comparative (e.g., “better”) or superlative (e.g., “best”). Adverbs that end in the suffix “-ly” have been derived from a related adjective (e.g., “quickly “ is derived from “quick “ ).

3.2.6 Conjunctions

Conjunctions, such as “and”, “although”, “because”, “but”, “however”, “or”, “nor”, “so”, “unless”, “when”, “where”, “while”, etc. are words that join words, phrases, clauses, or sentences. They can be discontinuous, e.g,. “either … or”, “neither … nor”, “both … and”, “not only … but also”, “on the one hand … on the other (hand)”, “not just … but”, and “not only … but”. They can take modifiers, such as “particularly”, as in Figure 3.6.

There are three major types of conjunctions: coordinating conjunctions, subordinating conjunctions, and correlative conjunctions. A coordinating conjunction (e.g., “and”, “but”, “or”, and “so”) joins two structures that have the same type. Their purpose is to express that two entities did something together, or two events happened at the same time. A subordinating conjunction (e.g., “after”, “although”, “because”, “before”, “if”, “how”, “however”, “since”, “once”, “until”, “when”, “where”, “while”, “whenever”, “as soon as”, “even if”, “no matter how”,  etc) join a subordinate (dependent) and a main (independent) clause. The main clause can be understood on its own. The dependent clause can only be fully understood in the context of the main clause, as its purpose is to provide background, explanation, justification, or possible exceptions to what is said in the main clause. Thus, they express what is known as rhetorical structure or discourse relations among clauses, which can occur either within the same sentence or between adjacent sentences. When they link adjacent sentences at the sentence level, these words function as adverbs, so subordinating conjunctions are often labelled as adverbs, wherever they occur, and some experts refer to them as conjunctive adverbs.  Sometimes subordinating conjunctions are labelled as prepositions, as in the Penn Treebank II. Discourse relations can exist without any explicit conjunction, but by using hand-annotated data, such as the Penn Discourse Treebank or the Biomedical Discourse Relation Bank, they can be identified using automated discourse parsing. A correlative conjunction is a discontinuous conjunction that joins words, phrases, or clauses that have a complementary relationship. Because they are discontinuous, they are harder to learn, and so automated systems do not always label them consistently. Figure 3.7 includes some sentences illustrating different types of conjunctions and how they are labelled using the default Stanford CoreNLP part-of-speech tagger.

3.2.8 Wh-Words

Wh-words that begin with the letters “wh-” like “who”, “what”, “when”, “where”, “which”, “whose”, and “why” and their close cousins “how”, “how much”, “how many”, etc. They are used for posing questions and are thus sometimes called interrogatives . Unlike the word types mentioned so far, they can be determiners, adverbs, or pronouns (both regular and possessive), and so it is typical to see them marked as a special subtype of each. Identifying phrases that include wh-words is important, because they usually occur near the front in written text and fill an argument role that has been left empty in its normal position, as in “Which book did you like best?” In informal speech one might say “You left your book where?” or “You said what?”, but the unusual syntax also suggests a problem (like mishearing, shock, or criticism). The semantics of the wh-expression specify what sort of answer the speaker is expecting (e.g., a person, a description, a time, a place, etc) and thus are essential to question-answering systems.

3.3 Part-of-Speech Tags

The general syntactic category of a word is also known as its part of speech (POS) whereas “tag” refers to labels for specifying the category and syntactic features (such as singular or plural). Today, the use of “tag” is often synonymous with the labels given in the Penn Treebank II (PT2) tagset [15] , [16] . There was no process of agreement for adopting this tagset as a standard. Instead, a group of linguistic experts, with resources to support the work, developed them and disseminated them widely. Along the way, refinements have been made so that human annotation is more reliable and the sets of words in each category are not too sparse; early versions had about 80 tags, while the current only has only about 35. The tag set and associated guidelines for English have been stable since 2015. (The word tags have been stable since 1999). Figure 3.8 includes the complete English tagset for words, excluding punctuation.

3.4 Multi-WOrd ConstituenTS

For each of the primary types of words, there is a corresponding phrase type that includes the main word (called the “head”), along with any modifiers (optional words or phrases that enhance the meaning), or arguments (words or phrases that are required to be present).  These phrases can also be combined recursively to form more complex phrases, clauses, or sentences.  Below we will overview the major types of phrases and some of the conventions that define them. A complete discussion of English grammar fills a book of over 1800 pages [17] . This complexity is one reason that modern grammars are learned from large collections of text, rather than written by hand.

3.4.1 Noun Phrases and Prepositional Phrases

Noun phrases are the most used type of phrase but also have the most variation. Noun phrases can  be simply a pronoun or proper noun, or  include a determiner, some premodifiers (such as adjectives),  the head noun, and some postmodifiers at the end. The determiner might be a single word or a complex expression such as a complete noun phrase that includes a possessive marker ( “-‘s” or “-s’ “) at the end. Gerunds are noun phrases where a verb that ends in “-ing” (tagged as VBG) acts as a head noun, as in the sentence “Walking is good exercise”.

It is common to describe noun phrases as a combination of a determiner and a nominal, where the nominal is an ordered sequence of optional  premodifiers, the head, and the postmodifiers. The premodifiers  can include a cardinal (such as “third”), an ordinal (such as “three”), a quantifier (such as “all” or “most”), other common nouns, an adjective, or an adjective phrase (such as “very green and slimy”). English only permits three types of postmodifiers: relative clauses (such as “the dog that found a bone ” or “the dog that I got at the humane society “), non-finite clauses  (such as “ I had something to eat” ),  and prepositional phrases. Relative clauses following the head of a noun often begin with a relative pronoun, such as  “that”, “which”,  “who”,  “whose”,  “whom”,  or “whomever” and sometimes also “when” or “where” [18] .  Sometimes these words can be omitted. So, instead of saying  “The meal that I ate was yummy” we might say “The meal I ate was yummy”.   When the relative pronoun is  omitted, this is sometimes described as being a reduced relative clause.  Also, the head noun will always fill some syntactic role within the relative clause (either a subject or object), so a grammatical relative clause cannot also include a filler for this same role. So, one cannot say “The meal that I ate the meal was yummy.”, as it overfills the object role of “ate”.

Prepositional phrases comprise a preposition followed by a noun phrase. Semantically, we use them to add locations, times, or generic modifiers to a noun or to a sentence. They can follow a head noun or verb in a noun phrase or verb phrase, respectively. They can also modify an entire clause, where they typically occur either at the very beginning or the very end.

3.4.2 Verb Phrases

Verb phrases (VP) comprise a sequence of auxiliaries or modals,  a main verb, the arguments of the main verb, and optional prepositional phrases as modifiers. Adverbs can appear almost anywhere within the VP. The arguments of a verb will depend on the verb, some take no arguments, some take one or two. An argument may also be restricted to be a particular syntactic structure such as  a noun phrase or a clause, or it may be a semantic requirement, such as being a description of a location. Linguists have used case grammars [19] or slot grammars [20] to describe the argument structures of verbs. For NLP several resources have been created that are available as part of the Unified Verb Index [21] . These resources include VerbNet, FrameNet and OntoNotes. For example, VerbNet is the largest verb lexicon for English. It groups together verbs with identical sets of syntactic frames and semantic predicate structures and provides information about those structures. Syntactic frames are sometimes also called “thematic roles”. Figure 3.9 shows some of the syntactic structures associated with “cut21.1”. OntoNotes is a corpus of text that includes annotation of a wide variety of  text (telephone conversations, newswire, newsgroups, broadcast news, broadcast conversation, and weblogs) with syntax, argument structure, and shallow semantics.

Figure 3.9 Example of syntactic argument patterns for cut (sense cut21.1) from VerbNet 3.3

NP V NP

example      “Carol cut the bread.” frame           Agent V Patient example     “Carol cut through the bread.” frame         Agent V {through|into} Patient example     “Carol cut the envelope open.” frame          Agent V Patient Result example     “Carol cut the bread with a knife.” frame          Agent V Patient {with} Instrument 3.4.3 Clauses and Sentences Clauses and sentences are structures that include a verb with a complete set of arguments. Sentences can either be statements (declaratives), questions (interrogatives), or commands (imperatives). Questions can either be yes-no questions (constructed by putting the auxiliary in front of the subject noun phrase) or wh-questions which include a question word at the front (“who”, “what”, “when”, “where”, “why”, “how”), and sometimes also an auxiliary before the subject noun phrase. In wh-questions the question word takes the place of some other constituent in the sentence (either a subject or an object of a verb or preposition) that is an unknown, such as the type of something. A passive sentence is one where the semantic object appears as the syntactic subject (the one before the VP) as in “The apple was eaten”.  Some examples of different types of sentences  are shown in Figure 3.10. Figure 3.10 Example sentences and their types The cat sat. Statement The cat chased a mouse. Statement The mouse was chased Passive statement The girl gave her cat a toy Statement The cat slept in the bed. Statement What did the cat do? Wh – question What  did the cat chase? Wh – question Who gave the cat a toy? Wh – question Who did she give the toy to? Wh – question What did she give the cat? Wh – question Where did the cat sleep? Wh – question Did the cat catch the mouse? Yes – no question Is it time to put the cat outside? Yes – no question Wake up the cat. Command Wash the bed when she is done sleeping. Command Clauses in English include complete declarative sentences (comprising a subject main verb and its required objects), dependent relative clauses introduced by a subordinating conjunction (e.g., “that”, “before”), interrogative sentences (i.e., questions) marked by a wh-word or by inverting the subject and the main verb or a modal, or a combination. When the wh-word at the front refers to one of the objects of the main verb or a prepositional phrase, then the normal position for that object will be empty in a grammatical sentence. Linguists refer to this phenomenon as movement and the location of the missing object is a gap or trace .  In the treebank data this information is not tracked, except to note that the sentence is a question introduced by a wh-word (i.e., SBARQ).  Lastly, adverbs, adjectives, and interjections can also occur as sequences of several adjacent words. Figure 3.11 shows some examples of these constructions and the category labels that are used in the Penn Treebank, and thus have become the standard for automatic processing as well. Figure 3.11 Examples of some common Penn Treebank Constituent tags NP Noun phrase in the tree sang. PP Prepositional phrase I walked VP Verb phrase I S Sentence, declarative SQ Inverted yes/no question SBAR Relative clause A cat is happy. The cat slept . SBARQ Direct questions, introduced by a wh-word ? SINV Inverted declarative sentence (subject follows tensed verb or modal) ADVP Adverb phrase  I am happy. ADJP Adjective phrase The bed is QP Quantifier phrase She had INTJ Interjection with several words I did not see you. 3.5 Subcategorization Figure 3.12 Examples of subcategorization 3.6 Lexical dependency An alternative to constituency for describing the legal sequences of words, is to describe sequences in terms of binary syntactic relations between a head word and an argument.  These relations are called lexical dependencies or just  “dependencies”. These dependencies include the categories of subject, direct object, and indirect object, and categories for different types of modifiers. Which of these arguments is required depends on the subcategorization constraints of the head word. When both a direct and an indirect object are required, the indirect object occurs first, unless it is contained inside a prepositional phrase that begins with “to”. Figure 3.13 shows examples where the main part of the dependency is marked in bold and the dependent part is marked in italics. Figure 3.13 Example dependency relations nsubj nominal subject The the mouse. dobj direct object The cat the . iobj indirect object The bird her a worm. iobj indirect object The bird a worm to her . pobj prepositional object The in the was sleeping. amod adjective modifier The sang. Both constituency and dependency induce a tree structure over legal sequences of words. The main difference between dependency trees and constituency trees  is that dependency trees store words at every node, whereas in constituency trees only store words in the leaves, and the nodes are marked with part-of-speech tags. Figure 3.14 includes an example of the representation for the sentence, “The cat slept in her warm bed”. The dependencies include that “cat” is the noun subject of the verb “slept”,  “bed” is a noun modifier of “slept”, “her” is a possessive noun modifier of “bed”, and “warm” as an adjective modifier of “bed”. (The relations “det” and “case” are the labels used for the corresponding function words.) Figure 3.14 Example dependency parse  (Image from CoreNLP.run) There are currently 37 universal syntactic relations defined by the Universal Dependencies organization (See Figure 3.15). Figure 3.15 Universal Dependency Relations defined in UDv2 acl: clausal modifier of noun (adjectival clause) fixed: fixed multiword expression advcl: adverbial clause modifier flat: flat multiword expression amod: adjectival modifier goeswith: goes with appos: appositional modifier iobj: indirect object aux: auxiliary list: list case: case marking mark: marker cc: coordinating conjunction nmod: nominal modifier ccomp: clausal complement nsubj: nominal subject clf: classifier nummod: numeric modifier compound: compound obj: object conj: conjunct obl: oblique nominal cop: copula orphan: orphan csubj: clausal subject parataxis: parataxis dep: unspecified dependency punct: punctuation det: determiner reparandum: overridden disfluency discourse: discourse element root: root dislocated: dislocated elements vocative: vocative expl: expletive xcomp: open clausal complement 3.7 Summary The types and features of words, The constituency of legal sequences of words, or Dependency relations that hold between pairs of words, and The subcategorization constraints that some words impose on sequences of words. Butte College 2020. The Eight Parts of Speech. URL: http://www.butte.edu/departments/cas/tipsheets/grammar/parts_of_speech.html Accessed May 2020. ↵ The videos can be found online. Here is one place to find them: https://www.teachertube.com/collections/school-house-rock-grammar-4728 ↵ Francis, W. N. and Kučera, H. (1964). Manual of Information to accompany A Standard Corpus of Present-Day Edited American English, for use with Digital Computers . Providence, Rhode Island: Department of Linguistics, Brown University. Revised 1971. Revised and amplified 1979. Available online at: http://icame.uib.no/brown/bcm.html ↵ Kučera, H. and Francis, W.N. (1967). Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English . Dartmouth Publishing Group. ↵ Greene, B. B., and Rubin, G. M. (1971). Automatic Grammatical Tagging of English. Technical Report, Department of Linguistics, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. ↵ Godfrey, J. and Holliman, E. (1993) Switchboard-1 Release 2 LDC97S62. Web Download. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium. ↵ Beis, A., Mott,  J., Warner, C., and Kulick, S. (2012). English Web Treebank LDC2012T13. Web Download. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, 2012. URL: https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2012T13 ↵ Silveira, N., Dozat, T., De Marneffe, M.C., Bowman, S.R., Connor, M., Bauer, J., and Manning, C.D. (2014). A Gold Standard Dependency Corpus for English. Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pp. 2897-2904. ↵ Weischedel, R., Palmer, M., Marcus, M., Hovy, E., Pradhan, S., Ramshaw, L., Xue, N., Taylor, A., Kaufman, J., Franchini, M.,  El-Bachouti, M., Belvin, R., and Houston, A. (2013). OntoNotes Release 5.0 LDC2013T19. Linguistic Data Consortium, Philadelphia. ↵ spacy.io (2020). spaCy English Available Pretrained Statistical Models for English. URL: https://spacy.io/models/en ↵ Li, S. (2018). Named Entity Recognition with NLTK and spaCy URL: https://towardsdatascience.com/named-entity-recognition-with-nltk-and-spacy-8c4a7d88e7da ↵ ANC.org (2015) Open American National Corpus URL: http://www.anc.org/ ↵ Napoles, C., Gormley, M. R., & Van Durme, B. (2012, June). Annotated Gigaword. In Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Automatic Knowledge Base Construction and Web-scale Knowledge Extraction (AKBC-WEKEX) (pp. 95-100). ↵ Essberger, J. (2012). English Preposition List . Ebook Online: http://www.englishclub.com/download/PDF/EnglishClub-English-Prepositions-List.pdf ↵ Bies, A., Ferguson, M., Katz, K., and MacIntyre, R. (1995). Bracketing Guidelines For Treebank II Style Penn Treebank Project . URL https://web.archive.org/web/20191212003907/http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/PennTreebank1995.pdf ↵ Warner, C., Bies, A., Brisson, and C. Mott, J. (2004). Addendum to the Penn Treebank II Style Bracketing Guidelines: BioMedical Treebank Annotation, University of Pennsylvania, Linguistic Data Consortium. ↵ Huddleston, R. D. and Pullum, G. K. (2002) The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ↵ Grammars for NLP use a variety of categories for these words including wh-determiner (which, that, who, whom), wh-possessive pronoun (whose), and wh-adverb (when, where). ↵ Fillmore, C. J., and Fillmore, S. (1968). Case Grammar. Universals in Linguistic Theory. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston: New York, pp. 1-88. ↵ McCord, M. C. (1990). Slot Grammar. In Natural Language and Logic. pp. 118-145. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. ↵ Kipper, K., Korhonen, A., Ryant, N., and Palmer, M.  (2008) A Large-scale Classification of English Verbs. Language Resources and Evaluation Journal ,42(1). Springer Netherland. pp. 21-40. ↵ Yallop, J., Korhonen, A., and Briscoe, T. (2005). Automatic Acquisition of Adjectival Subcategorization from Corpora. 10.3115/1219840.1219916. ↵ Open class words are categories of words, such as nouns and action verbs, where instances may be created or discarded over time, as new concepts are imagined. Closed class words belong to categories of words whose elements do not change, such as the pronouns and auxilliary verbs of English. The Unified Verb Index is a federated system which merges links and web pages from four different natural language processing projects related to verbs: VerbNet, PropBank, FrameNet, and OntoNotes Sense Groupings. Principles of Natural Language Processing Copyright © 2021 by Susan McRoy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted. Share This Book English Sentence Analyser 162 COMMENTS Chapter 4. Analyzing Sentences Chapter 4. Analyzing Sentences. Adapted from Hagen, Karl. Navigating English Grammar. 2020. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Syntax concerns the way that words are arranged into larger units. That is, words are the basic units—the building blocks—of syntactic analysis. Syntax in the English Language: Definition, Examples, and ... Syntax is the set of rules that helps readers and writers make sense of sentences. It's also an important tool that writers can use to create various rhetorical or literary effects. ... Syntax in the English Language: Definition, Examples, and 3 Ways to Use Syntax Effectively . Syntax: sentences and clauses Syntax involves arranging words to create logical phrases, clauses, and sentences. This is a big topic, so we'll be covering a lot, including: dependent and independent clauses; simple, complex, compound, and compound-complex sentences; and phrases and clauses. PDF An Introduction to English Sentence Structure syntactic analysis how the syntactic component of a grammar works the type of argumentation used in contemporary work in syntax It also aims to provide a description of a wide range of phenomena in English syntax, using concepts and constructs introduced in the book, and to give readers: hands-on experience of analysing speci PDF An Introduction to Syntactic Analysis and Theory 2 Syntactic analysis introduced 37 3 Clauses 87 4 Many other phrases: rst glance 101 5 X-bar theory and a rst glimpse of discontinuities 121 6 The model of syntax 141 7 Binding and the hierarchical nature of phrase structure 163 8 Apparent violations of Locality of Selection 187 9 Raising and Control 203 10 Summary and review 223 iii Beginning syntax introduction syntactic analysis Preface Introduction: what linguistics is about and what syntax is about 1. Tacit knowledge (or: several things you didn't know you knew about English) 2. Constituents and categories 3. Phrase structure rules and constituency tests 4. X'-theory 5. Movement 6. Binding 7. Syntax beyond English 8. The architecture of grammar Conclusion. 1.2. What is syntax? Key takeaways. Syntax is the study of phrase and sentence structure. A phrase is any well-formed string of words, while a sentence forms a complete thought. In linguistics, we put an asterisk (*) in front of phrases and sentences that are not well-formed. Different languages have different word order patterns. Analysing english sentences 2nd edition Analysing English Sentences is an excellent continuation of that tradition." Chris Collins, New York University "Another outstanding textbook from Radford - it is very up to date and takes students through the complexities of syntactic theory and how to do syntactic analysis in the most manageable way possible." Analysing English Sentence Structure Analysing English Sentence Structure continues in this tradition, offering a well-structured intermediate course in English syntax and contemporary syntactic theory. Chapters are split into core modules, each focusing on a specific topic, and the reader is supported throughout with learning aids such as summaries, lists of key hypotheses and ... PDF Practical Guide to Syntactic Analysis, 2nd Edition the study of syntax, at a level of detail which facilitates seeing the forest as well as the trees. 2. Guidance in doing and presenting syntactic analysis (Chapters 2-4). The discussion of argumentation and presentation is applicable not just to syntax, but to phonology, pragmatics, and semantics as well, and probably much more generally. A SHORT OVERVIEW OF ENGLISH SYNTAX A SHORT OVERVIEW OF ENGLISH SYNTAX. Based on The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Rodney Huddleston. The University of Queensland . This paper presents a brief account of English syntax based on The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, [1] providing an overview of the main constructions and categories in the language. The present version is intended primarily for members of the ... English Syntax: An Introduction English Syntax helps students appreciate the various sentence patterns available in the language, understand insights into the core data of its syntax, develop analytic abilities to explore patterns of English in more depth, and learn precise ways of formalizing syntactic analysis. The text and exercises cover a variety of English data and ... Analysing Sentences Analysing Sentences is an accessible and student-friendly introduction to the practical analysis of English sentence structure. The book covers key concepts such as constituency, category and functions, and uses tree diagrams throughout to help the reader visualise the structure of sentences. The fifth edition of this best-selling textbook has ... Syntax Analyzer Select themes and watch as sentences are uniquely crafted for your preference. Mix up to 3 topics to form an assortment of distinguished expressions. Try it now. Visual tool for English syntax analysis. Explore and edit sentence structures with a single click. Discover over 30 essential tags and generate tailored random sentences. Analysing Sentences An Introduction to English Syntax By Noel Burton-Roberts. Edition 4th Edition. First Published 2016. eBook Published 26 February 2016. Pub. Location London. ... This highly successful text has long been considered the standard introduction to the practical analysis of English sentence structure. It covers key concepts such as constituency ... What is Syntax? Definition, Examples of English Syntax Syntax is the grammatical structure of sentences. The format in which words and phrases are arranged to create sentences is called syntax. Let's look at an example of how a sentence can be rearranged to create varied syntax. Examples of Syntax in a Sentence: The boy jumped happily. The boy happily jumped. English Syntax: An Introduction English Syntax helps students appreciate the various sentence patterns available in the language, understand insights into the core data of its syntax, develop analytic abilities to explore patterns of English in more depth, and learn precise ways of formalizing syntactic analysis. The text and exercises cover a variety of English data and ... Definitions and Examples of English Sentence Structures In English grammar, sentence structure is the arrangement of words, phrases, and clauses in a sentence. The grammatical function or meaning of a sentence is dependent on this structural organization, which is also called syntax or syntactic structure. In traditional grammar, the four basic types of sentence structures are the simple sentence ... Analysing English Sentences Analysing English Sentences continues in this tradition, offering a well-structured introduction to English syntax and contemporary syntactic theory which is supported throughout with learning aids such as summaries, lists of key hypotheses and principles, extensive references, handy hints and exercises. Analysing Sentences Noel Burton-Roberts is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University. He is the author of The Limits to Debate: a Revised Theory of Semantic Presupposition (CUP 1989), the editor of Phonological Knowledge: Conceptual and Empirical Issues (OUP 2000) and Pragmatics (Palgrave, 2007), and the author of numerous articles on ... Overview of English Syntax 3 Overview of English Syntax. The order in which words and phrases occur matters. Syntax is the set of conventions of language that specify whether a given sequence of words is well-formed and what functional relations, if any, pertain to them. For example, in English, the sequence "cat the mat on" is not well-formed. English Sentence Analyser English Sentence Analyser. Use this page to analyse and learn English text. You can copy text into the box below or get a random sentence from our database. Press the Analyse button to get translations of the text and words. Dictionary entries from Wiktionary. case study cover letter presentation problem solving rewiew prompts websites tips