语言学教程(英文版)胡壮麟版

The course: Introduction to Linguistics

The textbook: Linguistics: A Course Book (3rd ed.)

The instructor: 王振亚 82388258 wangzhenya1969@https://www.360docs.net/doc/7e12965473.html, Chapter 1. Invitation to linguistics

Natural vs artificial languages

I. The definition of Language

Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication. System：rule-governed *loves Mary John *bkoo

Arbitrary: no logical relationship between language elements and their meaning: A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

A sound must seem to be an echo to its sense.

Vocal: speech is primary

Symbol: related to arbitrariness, language elements are only the symbols for the meaning they express

Human: uniquely human or human specific or species specific

Communication: the primary function of language

II. Design features of language

The defining properties of language

Arbitrariness: not entirely arbitrary:

onomatopoeic words

compoundings

derivatives

some surnames

Duality: the two subsystems of sound and meaning

Creativity: language users can understand and produce new sentences to express new meanings.

Displacement: language can be used to talk about things that are not present (structure-dependent operations)

III. Functions of language

Functions: broad categories of language uses

Informative: when language is used to express human experience and knowledge about the world.

Interpersonal: when language is used to establish and maintain social relations Performative: when language is used to perform certain acts

Emotive: when language is used to change the emotional states of an audience or used to express the speakers’ emotions or attitudes towards something or some

person.

Phatic communion: occurs when language is used for pure interpersonal purposes,

e.g. greetings, farewells, etc.

Recreational: when language is used for the pure joy of using it

Metalinguistic: when language is used to discuss itself

IV. The definition of linguistics: The scientific study of language

V. Main branches of linguistics

Phonetics: the description, classification and transcription of speech sounds Phonology: the study of speech sounds as a system: the relations between speech sounds, the way in which speech sounds are related to meaning, the rules

governing the structure, distribution and sequencing of speech sounds Morphology: the internal structures of words

Syntax: the internal structures of sentences

Semantics: the study of meaning as encoded in language

Pragmatics: the study of language use, meaning in context

Macrolinguistics: interdisciplinary

Psycholinguistics: psychology and linguistics combined, the psychological process in language production, comprehension and acquisition Sociolinguistics: sociology and linguistics combined, social functions of language and the social characteristics of language users, language varieties

and functions

Anthropological linguistics: anthropology and linguistics combined: the

relationship between language and culture

Computational linguistics: the use of computers to process or produce human language:

machine-translation

VI. Important distinctions in linguistics

Descriptive vs prescriptive studies

Describing language as it is used by its native speakers is descriptive.

Trying to lay down language rules for correct uses of language is prescriptive Modern linguistics is descriptive.

Synchronic vs diachronic studies

Studying language as it is used at a particular point in time is a synchronic study. Studying language as it changes over time is a diachronic study

Langue vs parole

Langue (language) is the language system: social, essential, stable

Parole is the actual use of the language system: individual, accidental, unstable Competence vs performance

Competence is the underlying knowledge about one’s language.

Performance is the actual use of that knowledge in language use situations.

Etic vs emic

Etic studies aim at producing an exhaustive list of a linguistic phenomenon. Emic studies aim at knowing the relationships between the entities in that list. Syntagmatic vs paradiamatic relations

Syntagmatic relations are relations between units present in the same sequence or construction. Syntagmatically related elements form structures.

Paradigmatic relations are relations between a unit and other units that can replace it in a given sequence. Paradigmatically related units form systems.

Chapter 2 Speech Sounds

I. The three branches of phonetics

Articulatory phonetics: the study of sound production

Acoustic phonetics: the study of sound transmission between interlocutors Auditory phonetics: the study of sound perception

II. Speech organs

Lungs 肺

trachea (wind pipe) 气管

vocal folds (cords) 声带: glottis声门: apart (voiceless: /p/), close together

(voiced: /b/), totally closed (glottal stop: /?/ tongue tip舌尖

tongue blade舌叶

tongue front舌前

tongue back舌后

tongue root舌跟

epiglottis会厌：a thin cartilaginous flap that covers the entrance to the larynx during swallowing, preventing food from entering the trachea. hard palate硬颚

soft palate (velum) 软颚

uvula小舌

teeth 牙

teeth ridge (alveolar ridge) 齿龈

lips (labium) 唇

nose鼻

larynx喉

pharynx咽

vocal tract声道

III. Segments, divergence, and phonetic transcriptions

Segments: smallest components of speech: bit -- /b/, /i/, /t/

Divergence: no one-to-one correspondent between pronunciation and spelling: ou –enough, house, through, though, etc.

Phonetic transcriptions: international phonetic alphabet. Its main principles include:

1)there should be a separate letter for each distinctive sound,

2)the same symbol should be used for that sound in any language in which it occurs,

3)it was to consist of as many Roman alphabet letters as possible, using new letters

and diacritics only when absolutely necessary.

Broad and narrow transcriptions 宽式和紧式音标

Diacritics: showing the minute differences between variations of the same sound,

e.g. h for aspirated sounds, ~ for nasalized sounds, 0 for devoiced sounds. Broad

transcriptions do not make use of these diacritics, while narrow transcriptions do.

IV. Consonants

Consonants: when there is an obstruction of the air stream in the production of a sound

1) Manners of articulation:

Stop 爆破音: complete closure of the articulators: oral stop: /g/, nasal stop: /m/ Fricative摩擦音: close approximation of two articulators: /s/, /z/

(median or central) approximant央通音: an articulator is close to another without producing a turbulent air stream /r/, /j/

Lateral approximant边通音: /l/

Affricate破擦音: /t∫/

2) Places of articulation

Bilabial唇音: two lips: /m/

Labiodental唇齿音: the lower lip and the upper front teeth: /f/

Dental齿音: the tongue tip or blade and the upper front teeth: /θ/

Alveolar齿龈音: the tongue tip or blade and the alveolar ridge: /t/

Post-alveolar后齿龈音: the tongue tip and the back of the alveolar ridge: /∫/ Palatal硬颚音: the tongue front and the hard palate: /j/

Velar软颚音: the tongue back and the soft palate: /k/

Glottal声门音: /h/

3) Voicing

4) Nasal vs oral

5) Lateral vs central

V. Vowels

Cardinal vowels: the reference points for the description and classification of vowels.

i u

e o

??

a ɑ

1) The part of the tongue that is raised: front /i:/, central /?/, back /α/

2) The height of the tongue: high, mid, low; closed /i:/, half closed /e/, half open /ε/, open /a/

3) The degree of lip rounding: rounded /u:/, unrounded /i:/

4) Monophthong vs diphthong or pure vowels vs glidings: /a/, /au/

5) Long vs short vowels or tense vs lax vowels: /i:/, /I/

Vowels in English

Front central back

High i: (beet) u: (boot)

I (bit) ? (put)

e (bait) o (boat)

Mid ? (bet) ??: (worker) ?: (bought)

? (hot, Br.)

? (bat) ? (but) ? (hot, Am.)

low a (buy) ɑ: (farm)

diohthongs: eI aI au ?I

ou I? u? e?

VI. Coarticulation and phonetic transcription

Coarticulation协同发音: in speech a sound may become more like its neighbouring sound.

Anticipatory coarticulation逆化协同发音: when a sound is influenced by the following sound, e.g. impossible

Perseverative coarticulation接续性协同发音: when a sound is influenced by the preceding sound, e.g. play

VII. Phonological analysis

Phonemes音位: distinctive speech sounds

minimal pairs最小对立体: pairs of words that differ in only one sound, e.g. pit-bit, bet-bat, cat-cap

contrastive distribution对立分布: the two different sounds in a minimal pair are in contrastive distribution. Normally sounds in contrastive distribution are different phonemes.

Allophones音位变体: variants of the same phoneme, e.g. light-wheel-play: clear-dark-devoiced, pipe: aspirated-unaspirated

complementary distribution互补分布: those sounds that never occur in the same environment are in complementary distribution, e.g. clear [l] before a vowel-dark [l] after a vowel-devoiced [l] after a voiceless consonant, aspirated [p] initially-unaspirated finally

phonetic similarity语音相似性: allophones of the same phoneme must be phonetically similar, e.g. /h/-/?/

pattern congruity模式一致性: when assigning a sound to one phoneme rather than another, we must take the sound pattern of the language into consideration, e.g. top [t]: alveolar, stop, voiceless, aspiated

stop [t]: alveolar, stop, voiceless, unaspiated

dot [d]: alveolar, stop, voiced, unaspirated

st-sd

Phonological processes

Assimilation同化: when a sound takes on some or all the characteristics of a neighboring sound

regressive assimilation逆同化: when a sound is influenced by the following sound, e.g. support

progressive assimilation顺同化: when a sound is influenced by the preceding sound, e.g. stop

Phonological processes: processes in which a sound undergoes a change in certain environments or contexts and we can write phonological rules to represent these changes: e.g.

Voiced sound → voiceless / voiceless _________

A voiced sound is transformed into a corresponding voiceless sound when it occurs after a voiceless sound: e.g. play

→ is transformed into; / specifies the environment in which the change occurs; _________ indicates the position of the target sound.

An alveolar sound → velar / _________ velar

An alveolar sound is transformed into a corresponding velar sound when it occurs before a velar sound: e.g. sink

VIII. Distinctive features

Distinctive features: according to Prague School linguists, a phoneme can be further analyzed into a set of features and the distinctive features are phonological; binary; articulatorily and acoustically based features.

Phonological: voicing-aspiration

Binary: present or absent

articulatorily and acoustically based features: articulatory or acoustic features. IX. Suprasegmental phonology超切分音系学concerned with those aspects of sound features that involve more than single sound segments

Suprasegmental phonemes超切分音位: stress, pitch, intonation

Syllables and syllabic structures: typically, a syllable consists of onset (consonant preceding the rhyme) and rhyme which consists of nucleus or peak (vowel or syllabic consonant) and coda (consonant following peak).

σ (syllable)

onset rhyme

peak coda

c a p (CVC)

The onset position may be empty (e.g. eat) or filled by a consonant (e.g. cap) or a consonant cluster of two or three consonants (e.g. play, street). The nuclear position may be filled by a vowel (e.g. cap) or a syllabic consonant (e.g. pencil,

pardon). And the coda position may be empty (e.g. tea) or filled by a consonant (e.g. cap) or a consonant cluster of two, three or four consonants (e.g. caps, sixth, sixths). So the syllabic structure in English can be represented as:

(((C) C) C) V ((((C) C) C) C)

Open syllable: a syllable without a coda (e.g. tea)

Closed syllable: a syllable with a coda (e.g. cap)

Stress: degree of force used in the production of a syllable

word stress: distinctive, e.g. PERfect, perFECT; REcord, reCORD

sentence stress: normally, content words are stressed in sentences, while grammatical words are unstressed, but in principle, sentence stress can fall on any word or syllable, e.g. He `went away-`John went a`way. She’s `fifteen years old-She’s `only fif`teen.

Pitch: different rates of the vibration of the vocal cords produce what is known in acoustics terms as different frequencies and in articulatory terms as different pithes. Pitch variations are called tones: tone languages and non-tone languages Intonation: when pitch, stress and length variations are tied to the sentences rather than to the word, they are collectively known as intonation.

1) intonation can indicate different sentence types: yes-no interrogatives vs other types of sentences.

2) intonation can impose different sentence structures on sentences, e.g.

Tom didn’t come because of Mary

Tell me when the plane arrives in London.

下雨天留客天留我不留。

做酒缸缸好做醋坛坛酸。

养猪大如山耗子全死完。

3）intonation can bring different part of the sentence into prominence, e.g. John likes fish.

Chapter 3 Lexicon

I. What is word?

Three senses of word

1）the physically definable unit: between pauses in speech and between blanks in writing

but can’t, doesn’t, for ever

2）the common factor underlying a set of forms: work, works, worked, working but if, and, the, very

3）a grammatical unit: sentence, clause, word group / phrase, word, morpheme

but nation, fast

Identification of word

1)stability: the constituent parts of a word have little potential for

rearrangement

at - *ta, playboy - *boyplay, John loves Mary - Mary loves John

2)relative uninterruptibility: new elements and pauses are not to be inserted into

a word

nationalization - *nationinteralization - *nation alization

(even) John doesn’t love Mary.

3) a minimum free form: the minimal unit that can constitute an utterance by itself

-Is Jane coming this evening? – Possibly.

-What is missing in a sentence such as ‘Dog is barking’? – A.

Lexeme: basic abstract units of the lexicon which may be realized in different grammatical forms such as the lexeme “work”in work,works,worked,working. A lexeme may also be a part of another lexeme, e.g. worker, workbook, workday. Idioms are also considered lexemes, e. g. the works of God: nature. Lexemes are the units which are conventionally listed in dictionaries as separate entries.

II. Classification of words

Variable vs invariable words

Variable words are words which have different grammatical forms.

Invariable words are words which do not have different grammatical forms. Grammatical vs lexical words

Grammatical words are words which express grammatical meanings, e.g. pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, etc. function words

Lexical words are words which have lexical content, e.g. nouns, verbs, etc. content words

Closed-class vs open-class words

Closed-class words are words whose membership is fixed or limited, e.g. conjunctions, pronouns, prepositions, etc. But even though prepositions are closed class words, they have been increasing in number slowly.

Open-class words are words whose membership is infinite or unlimited, e.g. nouns, verbs, etc.

Word classes: categories of words classified according to their grammatical, semantic, phonological properties or on the basis of formal similarities in terms of inflections and distribution. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections, articles

New word classes identified

Particles: the infinitive marker ‘to’and the negative marker ‘not’and the subordinate element in phrasal verbs, e.g. ‘at’ in look at and ‘out’ in knock out. Auxiliaries: the traditional auxiliary and modal verbs such as ‘do’ and ‘can’

Pro-forms: There are other pro-forms in English in addition to pronouns.

pro-adjectives: Your pen is red. So is mine.

Pro-verbs: He knows English better than I do.

Pro-adverb s: He runs very fast and so do I.

pro-locative: Jane’s hiding there, behind the door.

Determiners: words preceding the head noun and determining the kind of reference the noun phrase has, e.g. the (definite) student, a (indefinite) student, some (partitive) students, all (universal) students.

Pre-determiners: all, both, half, double, twice, one-third, etc.

Central determiners: (articles) the, a, (demonstrative pronouns) this, that, these,

those, (indefinite pronouns) every, each, some, any, no, either, neither, (possessive pronouns) my, our, your, his, her, its, their, etc.

Post-determiners: (cardinal numerals) one, two, etc. (ordinal numerals) first, second, etc. (general ordinals) next, last, past, other, additional, etc. (quantifiers) many, several, much, little, a lot of, a great deal of, etc. Determiners follow the order pre-determiner + central determiners + post determiners, e.g. all the five students, half a year, etc.

The members of each subclass are usually exclusive of each other. But ordinal numerals and general ordinals may occur before cardinal numerals, e.g. the first two days, the past three weeks, etc.

III. Formation of words

Morpheme and morphology

Morphemes: minimal units of meaning

Types of morphemes:

free morphemes: can stand alone as words, e.g. dog, map, nation

bound morphemes: have to appear with at least another morpheme, e.g. international, pre cede, etc.

roots: that part of the word left when all the affixes are removed, e.g. internationalism, antidisestablishmentarianism

free roots: roots that can be used as words, e.g. hopeful, interpersonal

bound roots: roots that have to appear with affixes, e.g. precede, receive, submit,

retain, recur

Some roots in English have both free and bound variants, e.g. sleepy, slept; childlike, children; goes, went

affixes: formative elements that have to be attached to at least another morpheme prefixes: paragraph, miniskirt, unemployed, incorrect

suffixes: national, socialist, physics

infixes:foot / feet, man / men, in Cambodian /sepolah/ (field), /segepolah/ (fields) stems: a morpheme or combination of morphemes to which an affix can be attached, e.g. national, internationalism

inflectional affixes and derivational affixes

4)inflectional affixes are productive across an entire category, e.g. –s to all

regular plural count nouns, but derivational affixes are not, e.g. production, connection, *maktion, increastion.

5)inflectional affixes often add only a grammatical meaning to the stem, but

derivational affixes often change the lexical content, e.g. maps, worker.

6)Inflectional affixes do not change the word class of the stem, whereas

derivational affixes may or may not change the word class of the stem, maps, smoker, incorrect.

7)Inflectional affixes are often conditioned by non-semantic linguistic factors,

e.g. John loves Mary. Whereas derivational affixes are more often based on simple

meaning distinctions, correct vs correctness.

8)In English, inflectional affixes are normally suffixes, whereas derivational

affixes can be prefixes as well.

9)In English inflectional affixes are very small in number, whereas derivational

affixes are much larger in number.

Inflection and word formation

Inflection: the manifestation of grammatical relationships through the addition of inflectional affixes, such as number, person, finiteness, aspect and case, which do not change the grammatical class of the stems to which they are attached. Word formation: the process of word variations signaling lexical relationships. It can be further classified into the compositional type (compounding) and the derivational type (derivation).

Compound: words that consist of more than one free morpheme or the way to join two or more separate words to produce a single form.

Compounds can be completely united: playboy, hyphenated: mother-in-law, separated: high frequency.

There are noun compounds, e.g. daybreak, haircut, verb compounds, e.g. brainwash, lip-read, adjective compounds, e.g. man-eating, heartfelt, prepositional compounds, e.g. into, throughout. Compounds can be classified into endocentric（向心的）and exocentric（离心的） compounds. In endocentric nominal and adjectival compounds, the head is derived from a verb. Nominal: self-control, pain-killer, core-meaning; adjectival: eye-entertaining, bullet-resistant, machine-washable. In exocentric nominal and adjectival compounds, the first word is derived from the verb. Nominal: playboy, scarecrow, breakthrough, get-together; adjectival: take-home, runaway, drive-in.

Derivation: showing the relationships between roots and affixes and changing or not changing the word class of the original words, e.g. unconscious, booklet, disobey, lengthen, foolish.

Phonology and morphology

1)morpheme and phoneme

A single phoneme may represent a morpheme, but they are not identical, e.g. /z/: goes, boys, boy’s, is.

2) morphemic structure and phonological structure

Morphemes may also be represented by morphemic structures other than a single phoneme, e.g. love ly (monosyllabic), tobacco (polysyllabic). The syllabic structure of a word and its morphemic structure do not necessarily correspond: teller /’tel?/ tell-er.

3) allomorph

Some morphemes have a single form in all contexts, e.g. dog, cat, etc. other morphemes may have different shapes or phonetic forms, e.g. {z}: maps, dogs, watches, oxen, teeth, criteria, craft; {in}: incorrect, impossible, irregular, illegal.

4)morphophonology or morphophonemics: the study of the relationship between

phonology and morphonology.

(1)phonologically conditioned

assimilation: maps, dogs, incorrect, impossible

dissimilation: peregrinus (Latin) → pilgrim, marbre (French) → marble

(2)morphologically conditioned

three requirements:

a.All the allomorphs should have common meaning, e.g. maps, dogs, watches.

b.All the allomorphs should be in complementary distribution, e.g. maps, dogs,

watches.

c.Allomorphs that share the common meaning should be in parallel formation, e.g.

ox → oxen (This pair is grammatically parallel to the pair of words below) cow → cows

IV. lexical changes

New words (neologisms, coinages) are created in the following ways:

Invention: Kodak, coke, nylon, fax, etc.

Compounding: moonwalk, chairperson, etc.

Derivation: semiconductor, supersonic

Blending: transfer + resister → transistor, smoke + fog → smog

tele-printer + exchange → telex, modulator + demodulation → modem Fusion( a special type of blendings): spaddle ←spank（拍）+ paddle（打）, riffle ← ripple（波纹）+ ruffle（波纹）, rampacious ← rampageous（暴跳的）+

rapacious（掠夺的）

Abbreviation: Clippings.

cutting the final part: advertisement → ad, mathematics → math;

cutting the initial part: aeroplane → plane; omnibus → bus;

cutting both the initial and final parts: influenza → flu, refrigerator

→ fridge

Acronym: the initial letters of the words in a phrase or idiom or the name of an organization: EEC ←European Economic Community, CIA ←Central

Intelligence Agency, Aids ← acquired immune deficiency syndrome, Radar

← radio detecting and ranging

Backformation: a shorter word is derived by deleting an imagined affix from a longer form: televise ← television, edit ← editor, diagnose ← diagnosis Borrowings: from many different languages, especially Greek (electricity, atom), Latin (tumor, alibi), French (table, pork), Spanish (armada, ranch) etc. Loanwords: both form and meaning are borrowed with only a light adaptation, e.g.

coupon (French), sputnik (Russian), kung-fu (Chinese), Judo (Japanese). Loanblends: part of the form is native and part is borrowed, but the meaning is fully borrowed, e.g. coconut (Spanish), Chinatown (Chinese),

loan shifts: the meaning is borrowed, but the form is native, e.g. bridge (a card game from Italian), artificial satellite (from Russian)

loan translation: each morpheme or word is translated from the equivalent morpheme or word in another language, e.g. free verse ←verse libre (Latin), black

humour ← humour noir.

V. Phonological change

Loss: the disappearance of the sound as a phoneme in the phonological system, e.g.

/x/ (the voiceless velar fricative) was lost between the times of Chaucer

and Shakespeare: hit → it, niht → night. Sound loss may also occur in

utterances at the expense of some unstressed vowels: temperature,

postscript, the pen and pencil

Addition: Sounds may be added to the original sound sequence, e.g. rascal →rapscallion, lier → liaison

Metathesis: the alternation in the sequence of sounds, e.g. brid → bird, middel → middle, lytel → little.

Assimilation: the change of a sound as a result of the influence of an adjacent sound (contact or contiguous assimilation), e.g. immobile (n → m), support (b

→ p). Sometimes assimilation may occur between two sounds that are not

too far apart (distant or non-contiguous assimilation), e.g. discussing

shortly (s →∫), confound it (?→ au).

VI. Semantic change

Broadening: to extend or elevate the meaning of a word from its original specific sense to a relatively general one, e.g. offend (to strike against → to

create or excite anger), bird (young bird → any kind of bird), companion

(a person with whom you share bread →a person who accompanies you), etc. Narrowing: the original meaning of a word is narrowed or restricted to a specific sense, e.g. girl (young person of either sex → young woman), deer (beast

→ a particular kind of animal), queen (wife →wife of a king or a female

king), etc.

Meaning shift: the departure of a word from its original domain as a result of its metaphorical usage, e.g. bead (prayer →prayer bead →small, ball-shaped

piece of glass, metal or wood), etc.

Class shift: conversion: the process in which a word changes from one word class to another, e.g. must (have to →an indispensable item), word (a language

unit → to express in words), etc.

Chapter 4 Syntax

1．Grammatical categories

Categories: grammatical categories: the defining properties of language units like nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverb, etc.

Number: the grammatical category of nouns, pronouns and verbs in English. There are usually two terms of number: singular and plural, e.g. a book, some books; he, they; He speaks English. They speak English.

Gender: the grammatical category of nouns and pronouns in English e.g. actor, actress; waiter, waitress; he, she. In English the gender distinction is natural as contrasted with the grammatical gender in many other European languages. There are only a small number of nouns indicating the gender distinction, and the elements indicating it are hardly inflectional.

Case: the grammatical category of nouns and pronouns. In English pronouns have three cases: nominative (I, he, they), accusative (me, him, them) and genitive (my, his, their), but nouns have only two cases: common (John, boy) and genitive (John’s, boy’s).

Tense: the grammatical gender of verbs, indicating the time of an event in relation to the moment of speaking, e.g. I am a student. I went to the zoo yesterday.

Traditionally: past, present, future, past future. Nowadays: past and present. Aspect: the grammatical category of verbs, distinguishing the status of events in relation to the time of another event, e.g. I was reading when he came to see me. When I got to the railway station the train had already left. Progressive or continuous vs perfect.

Voice: the grammatical category of verbs expressing the way sentences may alter the relationship between the subject and object of a verb, without changing the meaning of the sentence. The main distinction is between active and passive, as illustrated by The cat bit the dog and The dog was bitten by the cat; in the first sentence the grammatical subject is also the actor; in the second sentence the grammatical subject is the goal of the action – it is ‘acted upon’, and thus ‘passive’. There will be certain differences in the emphasis or style of these sentences, which will affect the speaker’s choice, but the factual content of the two sentences remains the same. English uses auxiliaries and inflectional forms of the verb to signal the voice contrast.

Mood: the grammatical category of verbs referring to a set of syntactic and semantic contrasts signaled by alternative paradigms of the verb, e.g. indicative, subjunctive, imperative. Semantically, a wide range of meanings is involved, especially attitudes on the part of the speaker towards the factual content of his utterance, e.g. uncertainty, definiteness, vagueness, possibility. Syntactically, these contrasts may be signaled by alternative inflectional forms of a verb, or by using auxiliaries. English mainly uses modal auxiliaries, e.g. may, can, shall, must, but makes a little use of inflection, e.g. If I were you…

In English there are two forms of the subjunctive, traditionally called the present and past subjunctive, although the use of these terms relates more to mood than to tense. Terms for the two major categories of the present subjunctive are the mandative and the formulaic subjunctive. These are realized, like the imperative, by the base form of the verb, e.g. I insist that the Council reconsider its decision. God save the Queen. The past subjunctive is conveniently called the were-subjunctive, since it survives as a distinguishable form only in the past tense of the verb BE, e.g. If she were leaving, you would have heard about it.

Degree: the grammatical category of adjectives and adverbs, distinguishing positive or basic(good, smart), comparative(marking an inequality of two states of affairs relative to a certain characteristic, e.g. better, smarter), and superlative (marking the highest degree of some quantity, e.g. best, smartest) levels. For some there is another level of degree, elative(absolute superlative, marking a very high degree of some property without comparison to some other states of affairs, e.g. The performance was most impressive.

Concord: agreement: the requirement that the forms of two or more words in a syntactic relationship should agree with each other in terms of some categories, e.g. concord in number, e.g. this boy, these boys; a book, some books, concord in number and person between the noun as the subject and the verb, e.g.

He speaks English,

They speak English.

Government: control over the form of some words by other words in certain syntactic constructions, a relationship in which a word of a certain word class determines the form of other words in terms of a certain category, e.g. the English verbs and prepositions determines or governs the form the pronouns following them, e.g. John gave her a book.

The test is important to me.

2. Syntactic relations

2.1. positional relations

Positional relations, or word order, refer to the sequential arrangement of words in a language. If the words in a sentence fail to occur in a fixed order required by the conventions of the language, the sentence is either ungrammatical or nonsensical. For example,

The boy kicked the ball.

*Ball the boy licked the. (ungrammatical)

*The ball kicked the boy. (nonsensical)

Positional relations are a manifestation of one aspect of “syntagmatic relations”or “horizontal relations” or “chain relations”at the sentential level. Word order is one of the basic ways to classify the languages in the world:

Word order: SVO, SOV, VSO, OVS, OSV, and VOS languages. English and Chinese are SVO languages;

Genetic relatedness: Indo-European languages, Sino-Tibetan languages, Semito-Hamitic languages, etc

Structural characteristics: isolating, agglutinative, inflectional.

2.2. Relation of substitutability

The relation of substitutability refers to classes or sets of words or expressions substitutable for each other grammatically in sentences with the same structure: The man smiles.

boy

girl

worker …

He went there yesterday.

last week

the day before

the day before yesterday …

the relation of substitutability is a manifestation of one aspect of “paradigmatic relations” or “associative relations” or “vertical relations”.

2.3. Relation of co-occurrence

The relation of co-occurrence means that words of different sets of classes may permit, or require, the occurrence of a word of another set or class to form a sentence or a particular type of sentences:

(preceded by) NP (followed by)

A pretty girl smiles.

The tallest boy sings.

The African man cries.

…

The relation of co-occurrence partly belongs to syntagmatic relations and partly to paradigmatic relations.

3. Grammatical constructions and their constituents

3.1 construction

Grammatical constructions or constructions or construct: any syntactic construction which is assigned one or more conventional functions in a language, together with whatever is linguistically conventionalized about its contributions to the meaning or use the construction contains.

On the level of syntax the distinction between external and internal properties is made:

External properties: the properties of the construction as a whole: anything a speaker knows about the construction that is relevant to the large syntactic contexts in which it occurs.

Internal properties: the construction’s make-up:

Mary ate an apple.

Subject + verb + object

this edition

Determiner + noun

may come

auxiliary + verb

Construction may also be a presentation of a constructional type:

Subject + verb + object (a constructional type)

Mary ate an apple. (a constructional token)

It is the construction in this sense that can be analyzed into constituents. 3.2 Constituent

Constituent: any linguistic unit, which is part of a larger unit: a morpheme may be a constituent of a word; a word may be a constituent of a word group or phrase;

a word group or phrase may be a constituent of a clause; and a clause may be a constituent of a sentence.

Immediate constituents: if a construction is analyzed into two constituents at a level immediately below that construction, they are the immediate constituents of that construction:

The boy ate the apple

The boy ate the apple

the boy ate the apple

the boy ate the apple

the apple

the apple

3.3 Immediate constituent analysis

This practice is known as immediate constituent analysis or IC analysis. In

immediate constituent analysis the constructions and constituents are often labelled as:

Word level phrasal

N = noun NP = noun phrase

A = adjective AP = adjective phrase

V = verb VP = verb phrase

P = preposition PP = prepositional phrase

Det = determiner S = sentence or clause

Adv = adverb

Conj = conjunction

e.g.

S

NP VP

Det N V NP

Det N

The boy ate the apple

The boy ate the apple

This is known as a tree diagram. Bracketing is also an economic notation representing the constituent structure of a grammatical construction: ((The) (boy))((ate) ((the) (apple)))

3.4. Endocentric and exocentric constructions

3.4.1. Endocentric constructions

Endocentric constructions are constructions whose distribution is functionally equivalent to that of one or more of its constituents, i.e. a word or a group of words, which serve as a definable center or head. e.g.

These two oldest stone bridges

head

will be leaving

head

very late

head

Usually noun phrases, verb phrases and adjective phrases are endocentric constructions.

3.4.2. Exocentric constructions

Exocentric constructions are constructions in which none of the constituents are functionally equivalent to the construction as a whole. That is there is no definable center or head. e.g.

The boy smiled.

The mobile phone is on the table.

He kicked the ball.

John seemed angry.

Usually basic sentences, prepositional phrases, verb + object constructions, link verb + complement constructions are exocentric constructions.

3.5. Coordination and subordination

3.5.1. Coordination

In English two or more units of equal syntactic status may be joined together to form a construction. This phenomenon is known as coordination and the construction is a c oordinate construction. Each of the syntactically equivalent constituents can stand for the whole construction functionally:

the lady or the tiger

go to the library and read a book.

down the stairs and out the door.

expensive but beautiful

Such a construction is usually considered to be doubly headed, since both the conjoined constituents are heads of the construction.

There is no limited to the number of coordinated constituents in a construction:

A man, a woman, a boy, a cat and a dog got into the car.

3.5.2. Subordination

Subordination refers to the process of linking constituents of different syntactic status, one being dependent upon the other, to form a construction. The subordinate constituents modify the head:

two dogs

can drink

swimming in the lake

hot beyond endurance

John believes that the airplane was invented by a German.

Elizabeth opened her present before John finished his dinner.

There is no limit to the number of subordinate constituents in a construction: John is a teacher who has been working in a university that was constructed in 1880 that witnessed the economic crisis that swept the world …

3.6. Syntactic function

Syntactic functions show the relationship between a linguistic form and other parts of the linguistic pattern in which it is used.

Syntactic functions are expressed in such terms as subject, object, predicate, complement, etc.

3.6.1. Subject:

In some languages the subject refers to one of the nouns in the nominative case: Pater filium amat. (the father loves the son)

Patrem filius amat. (the son loves the father)

In English the subject can be represented by a pronoun in the nominative case (the distinction between nominative and objective cases is formally made in only pronouns in English):

He loves her.

She loves him.

But in some languages the distinction between the nominative and objective cases is formally made in neither pronouns nor nouns.

In some languages the subject is said to be the doer of an action. e.g.

Mary slapped John.

But in John was slapped by Mary. The doer of the action is again Mary, but it is not the subject in this passive sentence. So we need to make the distinction between the grammatical and logical subject. In John was slapped by Mary. John is the grammatical subject and the logical subject is Mary.

Another traditional definition of the subject is “what the sentence is about”. But this definition does not always work, either:

Bill is a very crafty fellow.

Jack is pretty reliable, but Bill I don’t trust.

As for Bill, I wouldn’t take his promises very seriously.

In all these three sentences Bill is the topic. But it is the subject only in the first sentence. In the second sentence it is the object of the verb, while in the third it is the object of the preposition.

In English the subject has the characteristics presented below:

Word order: subjects normally precede verbal groups in statements:

Sally collects stamps.

I don’t know him.

Pro-forms: the first and second person pronouns in English can indicate whether they are the subject in a sentence:

He told me the story.

I told him the story.

Agreement with the verb: in the simple present tense a –s is added to the verb when a singular third person subject occurs in the sentence.

He speaks English well.

Content questions: when the subject is replaced by a question word, the rest of the sentence remains unchanged. But when other elements in the sentence are replaced by a question word, an auxiliary verb appears before the subject:

John stole the picture from the museum.

Who stole the picture from the museum?

What did John steal from the museum?

Tag questions: the pronoun in the tag normally corresponds to the subject of the sentence:

John loves Mary, doesn’t he?

3.6.2. Predicate

Predicate refers to a major constituent of the sentence structure in a binary analysis in which all obligatory constituents other than the subject are considered together:

The boy is running.

Peter broke the window.

Jane must be mad.

As predicate includes constituents such as verb, object, complement, etc. some people think it illogical to use a class-term, namely the verb, in grammatical analysis of a functional nature. The word predicator is suggested for the verb or verbs included in a predicate.

3.6.3. Object

Object may refer to the receiver or goal of an action and is further analyzed into direct object and indirect object:

Mother bought a doll.

Mother gave my sister a doll.

In some inflecting languages, object is marked by case labels: the accusative case for direct object and the dative case for indirect object.

In English object may be recognized according to its position in a sentence (after the verb and preposition) and according to case markers (for pronouns).

Mother gave a doll to my sister.

John kicked me.

Modern linguists suggest that object refers to the item that can become the subject when the sentence is transformed into a passive sentence:

John broke the window.

The window was broken by John.

Not all nominal groups that appear after a verb in an active sentence can be changed into the subject in a passive sentence:

He left last week. *Last week was left by him.

The match lasted three hours. *Three hours were lasted by the match

He changed trains at Fengtai, *Trains were changed by him at Fengtai.

Classes and functions determine each other, but not in a one-to-one relation: a class can perform several functions and a function can be fulfilled by several classes: a) The boy was playing.

He was playing football.

He came here last month.

Yesterday he went to the Summer Palace.

He is a student.

b) The dog was barking.

We will stay here.

One hundred is not a small number.

To run very fast can be dangerous.

Seeing is believing.

4. Phrases, clauses and sentences

4.1. Phrases

Phrases are single elements of structure containing more than one word, and lacking the subject-predicate structure typical of clauses. Traditionally they are seen as part of a structural hierarchy, positioned between clause and word. Therefore, a phrase must first be a group of words which form a constituent. Second, a phrase is lower on the grammatical hierarchy than clauses. More precisely, simple clauses may (and usually do) contain phrases, but simple phrases do not (in general) contain clauses:

the three tallest girls (nominal)

has been doing (verbal)

extremely difficult (adjectival)

to the door (prepositional)

very fast (adverbial)

But more complex phrases may contain other phrases or even clauses:

…the bird on the tree in the garden of that house in Beijing

John is a teacher who has been working in a university that was constructed in 1880 that witnessed the economic crisis that swept the world …

Some linguists make a distinction between word group and phrase. A word group is an extension of word of a particular class by way of modification with its main features of the class unchanged. Thus we may have nominal groups (the three tallest girls), verbal groups (has been doing), adverbial groups (very fast), adjectival groups (extremely difficult), conjunction groups (immediately after, just as), and prepositional groups (right below, all along), etc. A prepositional phrase remains a phrase which consists of a preposition and a nominal group (on the wall, in the office).

4.2. Clause

A constituent with its own subject and predicate, if it is included in a sentence, is a clause. Clauses can be classified into finite and non-finite clauses. Non-finite clauses include the traditional infinitive, participial and gerundial phrases:

John was reading a book when I visited him.

It’s great for a man to be free.

Having finished their task, they came to help us.

John being away, Mary had to do the work.

Do you mind my smoking here?