25-02-2013, 12:51 PM
Basic English Syntax with Exercises
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Language, Grammar and Linguistic Theory
This book attempts to describe some of the basic grammatical characteristics of the
English language in a way accessible to most students of English. For this reason we
start at the beginning and take as little as possible for granted. Definitions are given for
grammatical concepts when they are first used and there is a glossary at the back of the
book to remind the reader of these as he or she works through it. At the end of each
chapter there are an extensive set of exercises which the student is encouraged to
consider and work through either in class or alone. For those students working alone,
we have also provided model answers for the exercises. These are for the student to
check their understanding of the material supported by the exercises and to offer
observations that the student may have missed.
The uninitiated student might be surprised to find that there are many ways to
describe language, not all compatible with each other. In this book we make use of a
particular system of grammatical description based mainly on Government and
Binding theory, though it is not our aim to teach this theory and we will very rarely
refer to it directly. We use the theory to offer a description of English, rather than
using English to demonstrate the theory. We will spend a short amount of time at the
beginning of the book to state our reasons for choosing this theory, as opposed to any
other, to base our descriptions.
Word Categories
The Lexicon
The first assumption we will make is that one of the things that a speaker of a language
knows is facts about words. We know, for instance, how a given word is pronounced,
what it means and where we can put it in a sentence with respect to other words. To
take an example, the English word cat is known to be pronounced [kæt], is known to
mean ‘a small, domesticated animal of meagre intelligence that says meow’ and is
known to be able to fit into the marked slots in sentences (2).
Distribution
Let us turn now to the observations made in (2) and (3). There we observed that there
are certain positions in a sentence that some words can occupy and other words cannot.
Clearly, this is determined by category. This is perhaps the most basic point of word
categories as far as syntax is concerned. The grammar of a language determines how
we construct the expressions of the language. The grammar, however, does not refer to
the individual words of the lexicon, telling us, for example, that the word cat goes in
position X in expression Y. Such a system would not be able to produce an indefinite
number of sentences as there would have to be such a rule for every expression of the
language. Instead, the grammar defines the set of possible positions for word
categories, hence allowing the construction of numerous expressions from a small
number of grammatical principles. The question of how these positions are defined is
mostly what this book is about, but for now.