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English grammar: an outline English grammar: an outline RODNEY HUDDLESTON Department of English University of Queensland CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www. Cambridge. org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521311526 © Cambridge University Press 1988 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1988 Thirteenth printing 2005 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Huddleston, Rodney D. English Grammar. Bibliography Includes index. 1. English language — Grammar — 1950— I. Title PE1106.H76 1988 428.2 87-34124 ISBN 978-0-521-32311-6 hardback ISBN 978-0-521-31152-6 paperback Transferred to digital printing 2009 Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Information regarding prices, travel timetables and other factual information given in this work are correct at the time of first printing but Cambridge University Press does not guarantee the accuracy of such information thereafter. Contents Preface page ix Symbols and notational conventions xi 1 Preliminaries 1 2 The parts of speech: a preliminary outline 22 3 Verbs 37 4 The structure of kernel clauses 49 5 Tense, aspect and modality 69 6 Nouns and noun phrases 84 7 Adjectives, determinatives and numerals 108 8 Adverbs and prepositions 120 9 Clause type 129 10 Negation 143 11 The subordination of clauses 152 12 Thematic systems of the clause 173 13 Coordination 193 Further reading 208 Index 209 Vll Preface This book is intended as an introductory text for courses in English grammar at tertiary level. It offers an outline account of the most important and central grammatical constructions and categories in English. I have assumed only min- imal prior familiarity with the structure of English: all the grammatical terminology used is systematically explained. The analysis draws on the descriptive and theoretical advances made in modern linguistics, and for this reason the book could be used for an elementary course on English within a linguistics pro- gramme. It is, however, intended for a wider audience: for any course aiming to present a descriptive overview of the structure of English. Significant departures from traditional grammar in analysis or terminology are pointed out, normally in footnotes. One distinctive feature of the book is that it discusses the major grammatical categories at both a language-particular and a general level. The language- particular account gives the distinctive grammatical properties of the various categories as they apply to English: it thus provides the criteria for determining whether some word is a noun, verb, adjective, adverb or whatever, whether some verb-form is a past participle, a past tense form, etc., whether some clause is declarative, interrogative, imperative, exclamative - and so on. Analysis at the general level is concerned with what is common to the categories across languages, thus providing criteria for the application of the same terms in the grammars of different languages. For this reason the book could also be used as a reference work on English for a course in linguistic typology. I should like to record here my deep gratitude to Bernard Comrie, who was good enough to read the book in draft form and make numerous suggestions for improvement. Thanks are due also to Steve Johnson for helpful comments on several chapters. Neither, of course, is to be blamed for the faults that remain. Finally, I would express my thanks to Julie Lyons and Pauline O'Neill, who typed the book through several versions. IX Symbols and notational conventions Boldface italics indicate lexemes (see 1.2). Ordinary italics are used for citing sentences, words and other forms (in orthographic representation). / / obliques enclose phonological representations, indicating the pro- nunciation as opposed to the spelling. / oblique is used to abbreviate examples: He allowed!refused me a second go is an abbreviation of He allowed me a second go and He refused me a second go. () parentheses enclose optional items: / know (that) she is here indicates that the that may be present, / know that she is here, or absent, / know she is here. [] square brackets enclose relevant context for an example: [/ wonder] if it is true represents the form if it is true considered as occurring in the context 7 wonder < > angle brackets enclose letters representing different speakers in a conversational exchange: <A> What are you doing? - <B> Testing the chlorine level cites an exchange where What are you doing? is said by one speaker, Testing the chlorine level by another. * asterisk indicates that what follows is ungrammatical - at least in the construal under consideration. ? indicates that the grammaticality (or, if followed by *, the ungramma- tically) of what follows is questionable. '' single quotation marks are used as 'scare quotes', e.g. for technical terms not previously introduced. " " double quotation marks are used to represent meanings. ROMAN SMALL CAPITALS are used for emphasis. Roman bold face is used for important technical terms when explained. xi Symbols and notational conventions Xll The following abbreviations are used for syntactic classes, functions and other categories: Adj adjective O1 indirect object AdjP adjective phrase p predicator Adv adverb PC predicative AdvP adverb phrase PC0 objective predicative Cl clause PCS subjective predicative Comp complement pp preposition phrase Dep dependent Periph-Dep peripheral dependent Detnr determiner Pers person Detve determinative PI plural DetveP determinative phrase PossP possessive phrase Fern feminine Pred predicate Masc masculine Prep preposition Mod modifier S subject N noun Sg singular NP noun phrase TDC tensed declarative clause Neut neuter V verb O object VP verb phrase Od direct object Phonological symbols Consonants /p/ as in pie Idzl as mjaw /3/ as in pleasure N tie IV few /h/ hill Id/ die /e/ thigh /m/ meat N car N see /n/ neat I9l go M zoo /n/ wing mi chew III shy /r/ run Vowels /i/ as in pit as in putt /ea/ as inpaired /A/ /e/ pet M pot 1*1 sofa /«/ pat 1**1 pole " precedes a syllable carrying 'nuclear' stress (main stress within an intonation group) I indicates intonation with falling terminal, j with rising terminal Cross-references Cross-references to another section of the same chapter take the form \.. §3 above/below', while cross-references to a section in a different chapter take the form \ .. 4.3' (i.e. section 3 of Ch. 4). Preliminaries The description of a language comprises three major components: phonology, grammar and lexicon. The phonology describes the sound system: consonants, vowels, stress, intonation, and so on. The two most basic units of grammar are the word and the sentence: one subcomponent of grammar, called morphology, deals with the form of words, while the other, called syntax, deals with the way words combine to form sentences. The lexicon - or dictionary, to use a more familiar term - lists the vocabulary items, mainly words and idioms (such as red herring, give up, and so on), specifying how they are pronounced, how they behave grammatically, and what they mean. In this book we will confine our atten- tion to the grammar, with only occasional passing mention of phonological and lexical matters. On another dimension we can distinguish between the study of linguistic form and the study of meaning: all three of the major components are concerned with aspects of both. The special term semantics is applied to the study of meaning, and we can accordingly distinguish phonological semantics (covering such matters as the meanings expressed by stress and intonation), grammatical semantics (dealing with the meanings associated with grammatical categories such as past tense, interrogative clause, and so on) and lexical semantics (the meanings of vocabulary items). The relation between form and meaning in grammar is by no means straight- forward. This is one of the issues we shall need to consider in this introductory chapter, where the aim is to explain briefly the model or framework of grammatical description that we shall be using in the book and the methodological approach adopted. We begin with the question of how we can go about defining the various grammatical categories that will figure in the description - categories such as noun, subject, imperative clause, past tense, and so on: there will inevit- ably be a considerable number of them. 1. Grammatical categories: definitions and prototypes It is important to distinguish two levels at which our grammatical categories need to be defined: the language-particular level and the general level. At the language- 1 2 Preliminaries particular level we are concerned with the properties that characterise the category in the particular language under consideration, which in our case of course is English but which might equally well be French, Urdu, Vietnamese or whatever. At this level we investigate, for example, how nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc., behave differently in English sentence structure, how English distinguishes between the subject and object of a verb, and so on. At the general level, by con- trast, our concern is with the properties that are common across different languages to categories such as noun, verb, adjective, subject, object. To make the distinction more concrete, consider the part-of-speech analysis of the underlined words in the following sentences: (1) i The boss had watched the secretary destroy the files ii The boss had witnessed the destruction of the files At the language-particular level we will give the criteria that lead us to put all the words with solid underlining (boss, secretary, etc.) into one part-of-speech, and all those with broken underlining (had, watched, etc.) into a second. At the general level we will give the criteria that lead us to call the first class 'noun' and the second 'verb'. We do not devise a fresh set of terms for each new language we describe but draw, rather, on a large repertoire of general terms: definitions at the general level provide a principled basis for applying these terms to the various categories that need to be differentiated in the grammatical description of particular languages. Considerable confusion arises when this distinction of levels is not made, when what is really a general definition is in effect presented as though it were a language-particular definition - and this happens quite frequently in traditional grammar, especially traditional school grammar. For example, the standard traditional definition of a noun as 'the name of a person, place or thing' is commonly presented as though it provided the criterion for deciding which words in English are nouns (i.e. as though it provided a language-particular definition), whereas it should be construed as providing a criterion for deciding which word class in English should be called 'noun' (i.e. as part of a general definition). For when it is construed at the language-particular level, the definition is clearly un- satisfactory. Suppose we take 'thing', as it appears in the definition, as equivalent to 'concrete object'. By this criterion destruction would be excluded from the class of nouns, as it obviously does not denote a concrete object; but in fact all gram- marians include it in the noun class - because in terms of the way it enters into the structure of grammatical sentences it behaves like boss, secretary, etc. Nor does the definition fare any better if we say that 'thing' is to be interpreted in some abstract sense, since this simply makes it circular and unworkable. For we would have no way of determining whether a word was the name of a thing in this more abstract sense which did not presuppose that we already knew whether it was a noun. Thus the way we decide to assign destruction in (ii) and destroy in (i) to different classes is by noting, not that destruction denotes a thing while destroy does not, but rather that they differ in their grammatical behaviour. In the first place, the verb destroy takes as 'complement' an expression like the I Grammatical categories 3 files, but nouns do not take complements of this kind: destruction takes a complement introduced by of. Secondly, destruction, like other nouns, enters into con- struction with the 'definite article' the, but we could not add the before destroy in (i). Thirdly, if we wanted to add a modifier, we would use an adjective with the noun destruction (e.g. the surreptitious destruction of the files) but an adverb with destroy (e.g. surreptitiously destroy the files). And so on. It is properties of this kind that must figure in our definitions of nouns and verbs at the language- particular level. At the general level we will reformulate the definition to avoid misinterpretation, saying that 'noun' is the part of speech which contains among its most elementary members those words that denote persons, places or concrete objects. Because it is a general definition, the fact that not all nouns in English denote persons, places or concrete objects does not invalidate it. Boss, secretary, files, destruction belong to the same part of speech in English because they are alike with respect to the kind of grammatical property mentioned above; this part of speech we then call noun because this is the one to which words denoting persons, places and concrete objects belong - words like boss, secretary, files. As a second example, consider the category 'imperative clause'. Imperative contrasts with 'declarative' and 'interrogative', as illustrated in (2): (2) i Be generous! Imperative ii You are generous Declarative iii Are you generous? Interrogative An imperative clause is commonly defined as one that is used to issue a command or request. But it is easy to see from examples like (3) that this will not work as a language-particular definition. (3) i Have a good holiday Imperative ii Passengers are requested to remain seated Declarative iii Would you mind speaking a little more slowly? Interrogative The imperative (i) would normally be used to express a hope or wish rather than a request, and conversely (ii) and (iii) would normally be used as requests but are not imperative clauses. A language-particular definition of imperative clause for English will have to refer to the grammatical properties that distinguish clauses like (i) in (2) and (3) from declaratives like (ii) and interrogatives like (iii). Note, for example, the form of the verb in (2): be in (i), but are in (ii) and (iii) - and again it is are that we find in (3ii). Another difference is that the imperatives here have no subject, whereas the declaratives and interrogatives do (you or passengers). On the basis of such differences - which we will need to specify with a good deal more care and precision - we will assign clauses like (2i) and (3i) to a distinct clause class at the language-particular level, and we can draw on the fact that members of this class are CHARACTERISTICALLY used as commands/requests to apply the general term 'imperative' to the class that we have established. Again, then, we will need to reformulate the traditional definition so as to make clear that it is to be interpreted at the general level: the term 'imperative clause' will be applied to a grammatically distinguishable class of clauses whose