RESUME
“Exploring
Language Structure A Student Guide”
Created by :
Edwin Agung Saputra (1221110080)
Elsa Oktriani (12211100)
Hengki Ternando (1221110046)
Piter Julius Vero (12211100
Group :
X
Class :III
A
Lecturer : Feri
Susanto,M.pd
UNIVERSITAS
MUHAMMADIYAH BENGKULU
FAKULTAS
KEGURUAN DAN ILMU PENDIDIKAN
PRODI
BAHASA INGGRIS
TAHUN
2014
1. Introduction
to morphology
and syntax
If you were to ask anyone the question
“What is language?” you would probably
receive an answer that includes the word “communication.” Most of
us, if we
think about our language at all, have the common-sense notion that
language
exists for the purpose of communication. This way of thinking
views language as
a “tool” that people use to accomplish the “job” of communication.
It may not be
the only tool that people use for this job, and it may help
accomplish other jobs
as well. However, many people, both linguists and non-linguists,
have the idea
that the main
purpose of human language is
communication.
Viewing language as a tool has profound
consequences for all kinds of applications.
Whether you are planning to contribute to linguistic theory,
document one
of the many unwritten languages of the world, prepare educational
materials, or
simply learn to speak a second language, you will profit greatly
from a perspective
that considers language as a tool for communication. In this
introductory section,
we will explore this perspective in some detail, after which we
will discuss some
fundamental concepts of linguistic analysis.
Every tool has two components: a function
and a form. The
function is the job the tool is designed to accomplish, and the
form
is the tangible structure that accomplishes that job. For example,
the
main function of the kind of hammer pictured here is to pound
nails
intowood and to remove them. The form is the shape of the iron
head
attached to a handle, as in this picture. Though individual
hammers
may differ from one another in many ways, they also have a lot in
common. This particular form is specially adapted to the function
of
pounding nails. If it had a form that was very different from
this, it
would not serve this purpose. Imagine a hammer with a paper head,
or one lacking
a handle. Such poor excuses for hammers would not be very useful
for pounding
nails (though they might serve some other purpose). So the
function “motivates”
(provides a reason for) the form of this very useful device.
Without a function,
the form would be simply an odd-shaped lump of iron and wood.
Of course, you don’t have to use a hammer to pound nails – a hard rock or the
heel of your shoe might do. Furthermore, because the hammer has
its particular
form, it also may be used to accomplish other functions, perhaps
straightening
metal, or breaking up concrete. But its main function has the
greatest influence
on its basic form
The form–function composite
Linguists usually assume that language
consists of elements of form
that people employ to “mean,” “express,” “represent,” or “refer
to” other things.
Although linguists often imply that the linguistic forms
themselves express concepts,
this must be taken as a shorthand way of saying that speakers use linguistic
forms (among other tools) to accomplish acts of expressing,
referring, meaning,
etc. (Brown and Yule 1983:27ff.). For example, a word is a
linguistic form. In
and of itself it is just a noise made by someone’s vocal apparatus.
What makes
it a word
rather than just a random noise is that it
is produced intentionally in
order to express some idea. When used by a skilled speaker, words
can combine
into larger structures to express very complex ideas. While
linguistic forms help
people formulate ideas, and may constrain the concepts that can be
entertained,
the linguistic forms themselves are logically distinct from the
ideas that might be
expressed, in the same way that the form of a hammer is distinct
from the job of
pounding nails.
Grammar
What image comes to mind when you hear the
word grammar?
For many people this word brings back painful childhood memories
involving
lists of “do’s” and “don’ts” in speech and writing: “never say
‘ain’t’,” “never split
an infinitive,” “never say ‘him and me’,” etc.
To a linguist, the word “grammar” has a very different meaning.
Grammar
in the broadest linguistic sense is simply everything a person
needs to know in
order to be a fluent speaker of a language. For example, the way
of forming a
noun phrase discussed above is part of the grammar of English – it
is something
that all English speakers unconsciously “know.”
Morphology and syntax
In this section we will briefly discuss
how the subject matter of this
book, sometimes referred to as morphosyntax, relates to the other subheadings
within the domain of Grammar.
Phonetics and phonology have to do with
how the sounds of language are
produced in the human vocal organs (lungs, larynx, mouth, nasal
cavity), and
how sounds are systematically organized in particular languages.
Morphosyntax
has to do with howthese sounds combine to formwords and sentences.
Semantics
has to do with the meanings of individual elements of linguistic
structure and their
combinations.
Lexicon
So far we have described two subheadings
within the general domain
of Grammar in any language – the morphology and the syntax.We have
seen that
communicational jobs that are accomplished morphologically in one
language
can be accomplished syntactically in another. There is one other subheading
that perhaps should be considered alongside these two. This is the
lexicon.
Three expression types compared
Nowthat we have discussed the three major
subheadings under Grammar
that we will be most concerned with in this book, we can compare
different
expression types
that languages provide to allow speakers
to express variations
in meaning. These expression types are lexical
expression, morphological
processes, and syntactic (or analytic) patterns.
2. Morphological
processes and
conceptual categories
Having discussed the differences among
lexical, syntactic, and morphological
expression types, we will now concentrate more specifically on
kinds of morphological
processes, and the conceptual categories they express. For
example, “past tense,” “plural,” “masculine,” and many other
elements of meaning
are all conceptual categories that are often expressed
morphologically in the
world’s languages. In this chapter we will discuss the notion of
conceptual categories
in some depth, and then describe three analytical methods that
linguists
often use to represent and analyze morphological patterns.
Conceptual categories and the problem of labeling
Each language categorizes the universe in
its own unique way. This
truism is obvious to anyone who has tried to learn a second
language. In fact, one
could go a step further and say that each individual person
categorizes the universe
in a unique way. A good part of the art of human communication
involves figuring
out how our individual categorization scheme compares with the
schemes
of people we are trying to communicate with, whether we are
speaking the
“same language” or not. For example, native English speakers who
learn Spanish
are often perplexed by the fact that Spanish has two “past
tenses.” It seems
at first that there are two ways to translate a sentence like the
following into
Spanish:
(1) English sentence: I knew Aileron when she was a child.
Spanish translation #1: Yo conoc’ıa a Aileron cuando ella era
ni˜na.
Spanish translation #2: Yo conoc’ı a Aileron cuando ella era
ni˜na.
Notice that the Spanish verb conocer occurs in two different forms, both of
which refer to a past situation. However, bilingual speakers know
that Spanish
sentence #2 really does not mean ‘I knew Aileron when she was a
child.’ In
fact it means something more like ‘I met Aileron when she was a
child.’ The
different endings on the Spanish verb categorize the world
differently than the
tenses in English do, therefore English speakers must
“reconceptualize,” or reorganize,
their native categorization scheme in order to become fluent
speakers
of Spanish. This is just one simple example of how categorization
varies from
language to language.
The “big ten” morphological processes
Chapter 1 distinguished three general
expression types that languages
use to accomplish communicative work. These were lexical
expression, syntactic
patterns, and morphological processes. In this chapter we are
concentrating on
morphological processes. First we will describe and exemplify ten
morphological
processes that will be important in the rest of this book. We will
refer to these as
the “big ten.” These are listed below, with brief explanations and
examples:
• Morphological process #1, Prefixation:
(English) selfish→unselfish
Prefixation
involves the addition of a morpheme (a
prefix) to the beginning
of a root. In English the morpheme un- is a prefix. Often languages allow several
prefixes to be attached to one root. An example of this in English
would be a word
like: antidisestablishment. This word has at least two prefixes, anti- and dis-.
• Morphological process #2, Suffixation:
(Spanish) hablar→hablar’e
Suffixation
involves the addition of a morpheme (a
suffix) to the end of a
root. In English, the past tense is often expressed with a suffix
spelled -ed as in
called. As
with prefixes, there can be more than one suffix on a word. A word
like establishments
in English has a suffix -ment and another suffix -s.
• Morphological process #3, Infixation:
(Bontoc) fikas ‘strong’→fumikas ‘strength’
Infixation
involves the addition of a morpheme (an infix) in the middle of
a root. Standard Englishes do not employ infixation, but many
other languages
do. The example above is from Bontoc, an Austronesian language
spoken in the
Philippines. Various spoken varieties of English do employ
infixes, usually for
emotive, humorous, or social solidarity reasons.
Compounding
involves combining roots to form new
stems. In the English
example above, it is impossible to identify one part as the root
and the other as an
affix. Black
and bird are
both roots that clump together morphologically to form
a stem. The new stem, blackbird,
expresses an idea that is more than simply the
combination of the meanings of the two roots – this word does not
refer to any
bird that happens to be black, but rather to a specific species of
bird. Even though
this word is formed out of two roots, it functions just like other
noun stems in the
language.
Having introduced ten major morphological
processes, we now turn to a discussion
of various methods linguists use to “model” or represent
morphological
processes and the conceptual categories they express.
Methods for representing morphological processes
Prose _
As mentioned in chapter 1, many of the
grammatical patterns in language
may be expressed in ordinary prose. When doing morphosyntactic
analysis,
it is very important to be explicit, and sometimes grammatical
patterns are so
complex that explicit prose statements become difficult to follow.
In these cases
linguists have found it useful to employ various notational
systems. In the following
sections we will discuss two mathematically explicit methods for
representing
patterns of linguistic behavior. These are particularly useful for
representing
morphological processes, though they could, in principle, be used
to express syntactic
patterns as well. It should be kept in mind, however, that prose
statements
are often the most communicative way of expressing facts about
grammatical
structure.
3. Morphophonemics
Sometimes a morpheme has more than one
shape, depending on the environment
in which it occurs. The shape of a morpheme may be affected by
nearby
sounds, by the kind of stem it is attached to, or by other
conditioning factors.
The systematically distinct shapes of a morpheme are called its allomorphs.
When a morpheme changes its shape in response to the sounds that
surround it
in a particular context, linguists often call the variation morphophonemics
(or morphophonology), and the patterns that describe the appearance
of
the allomorphs morphophonemic rules (or morphophonological
rules). Morphophonemic rules are very different
from the morphological rules
described in chapters 1 and 2, and should always be kept quite
distinct conceptually.
Morphophonemic rules do not express conceptual categories. Rather,
they
simply specify the pronunciations (the “shapes”) of morphemes in
context, once
a morphological rule has already applied.
Things are not
always as
they appear . . .
Morphophonemics can also be thought of as
the interface
between phonology and morphology. Phonological
patterns (or “rules”) specify the pronunciation of
sounds in
particular environments. They only make reference
to sequences of sounds, and not to whether those
sequences involve particular morphemes or not. Morphophonemic
patterns in most cases are just phonological patterns
that come into play when morphemes come together
in words. Occasionally, however, there are morphophonemic
patterns that only
apply when certain morphemes
come together. These are morphophonemic patterns that
are not, strictly speaking, phonological patterns. We will
see examples of morphophonemic patterns that are phonological,
and some that are strictly morphophonemic in the
following pages. Our aim in this chapter
is to present
enough background in morphophonemics for you to understand
and solve morphology problems that involve allomorphs.
You will learn much more about phonological and
morphophonemic patterns in phonology courses.
Specifying the environments for
morphophonemic rules
As mentioned above, morphophonemic rules
are very different from
the grammatical (including lexical, morphological, and syntactic)
rules described
in chapters 1 and 2. Those were patterns that express conceptual
categories, e.g.,
“add -ed to form the past tense of a verb.”
Morphophonemic rules in some sense
“come after” such grammatical rules. They specify the various
pronunciations of
morphemes as they are used in different contexts, or environments.
In the example
of the English plural morpheme, we are only talking about one
grammatical
rule, namely “add something to a noun in order to make the noun
plural.” The
“something” is the idealized underlying form of the plural
morpheme. Morphophonemic
rules then specify the actual pronunciation of morphemes in
various
contexts.
Rule ordering
Sometimes several morphophonemic rules may
apply to the same
form. When this happens, it may be necessary to specify that the
rules apply in
a particular order. To illustrate morphophonemic rule ordering,
let’s consider the
additional data in table 3.24
In these data there are several rules that
interact. One set of rules are the
morphophonemic rules presented in 13 that specify which allomorph
of the plural
morpheme should be used, and the other is a rule that affects the
stems of nouns
that end in nt.
Nasal assimilation in English
In this section we will discuss one more
example of allomorphic
variation in English. In the process, we will introduce an
important notion in
morphophonemic analysis: the alpha notation.
One of the most common pronunciation patterns in the world’s
languages is
nasal assimilation.
4. Word
classes
Wehave already been usingword-class terms,
such as “noun,” “verb,” “adjective,”
and “adverb” in our descriptions of the morphosyntactic tools that
people use to
express conceptual categories. In this chapter we will discuss
word classes in a
little more detail, giving prototype definitions of the major
classes and suggesting
methods for determining word classes in an unfamiliar language.
In traditional grammar, word classes are called “parts of speech.” Every
language has at least two major word classes – nouns and verbs.1 Two other major
classes, adjective and adverb, may or may not occur in any given
language, though
they usually do to some extent. Most languages also have smaller,
or “minor,”
word classes such as conjunctions, particles, and adpositions. As
with most classification schemes in linguistics, word classes tend
to be interestingly
untidy. Nevertheless, core notions, or prototypes, can usually be
identified.
One important property ofword classes is that the class of any
givenword often
varies according to how it is used in discourse (see Hopper and
Thompson 1984).
Sometimes subtle morphosyntactic “tests” are needed to determine
the class of a
given word, and other times the class can only be inferred from
the context. For
example, it is impossible to say whether English words like rock or run
are nouns
or verbs apart from a context:
(1) a. Fezzik threw a rock at
Wesley. (rock used as a noun)
b. We’ll rock
tonight! (rock used as a verb)
c. They run
the department like a circus. (run used as a verb)
d. She’s going for a run right
now. (run used as a noun)
Many English stems can be used either as nouns or verbs, though
others tend
strongly to favor one class or the other:
(2) a. Let’s watch television.
(television used as a noun)
b. ?She televisioned
her children into submission. (television used as a verb)
c. Harold lingered
on the veranda. (linger used as a verb)
d. ?He went for his linger at
noon. (linger used as a noun)
The important point is that the word class of any form is not
necessarily given
once and for all in the lexical entry of the root.
Nouns
For nouns and verbs, prototypes can be
identified in terms of meaning.
The class of nouns in any language includes words that refer
to highly
bounded or individuated entities, e.g., ‘tree,’ ‘mountain,’
‘mausoleum,’
etc. These are concepts that tend not to change very much over
time, and which
can be referred to repeatedly in discourse as the same thing. For example, a storyteller
may refer to one of the characters in a story as a king. From then on the
same character may be freely mentioned, sometimes as the king, other times as
he, her husband, the princess’ father, the
tyrant, etc. In context,
each of these
expressions could be understood as making mention of the king.
Hopper and
Thompson (1984) describe this property of prototypical nouns as discourse
manipulability.
Verbs
Prototypical verbs
are words that describe visible events
that
produce changes in the world, e.g., die, run, break, cook, explode. This characterization
defines one extreme of a continuum, of which prototypical nouns
occupy the other extreme. In determining whether a questionable
form is a verb
or not, one must determine how closely it matches the
morphosyntactic pattern
of prototypical verbs.
Adjectives
An adjective is a word that can be used in a noun
phrase to
specify some property of the head noun of the phrase, for example
its color,
size, shape, temperament, or other property
concepts (Thompson 1988).
Another major function of adjectives is to express the main
semantic content of
a verb phrase, as in the following:
(50) My holiday was very long.
The phrase very long is an Adjective Phrase (AP), because its distributional
properties are determined (or projected) by the adjective long (see the discussion
of syntactic headship of noun phrases above). This whole phrase,
in turn, is a
major part of the verb phrase was very long.
The syntactic head of this verb
phrase is the verb was.
This is evidenced by the fact that the string was very
long has
all the distributional properties of verb phrases, and does not have the
properties of adjective phrases. For example, you cannot modify a
noun with
the phrase was
very long (example 51b),
whereas you can modify a noun with
the phrase very
long (51a):
(51) a. That very
long book was fascinating.
b. *That was
very long book was
fascinating.
Another respect in which was is
the syntactic head of the phrase was very
long in
example 50 is that it expresses all of the inflectional categories (tense,
aspect, person, etc.) needed for this phrase.
5. Exploring
subclasses
As mentioned in the previous chapter,
every language has subclasses within the
major word classes. Subclasses exist when some stems in a class
have different
grammatical properties from others. There are many reasons why
subclasses
exist, and those reasons may not be obvious to a linguist who is
learning the
language for the first time, so it is a matter of grammatical analysis
to determine
what the subclasses are, and, if possible, determine their motivations, i.e.,
the reasons why they exist. As we will see in the next section,
some subclasses
are motivated by structure, and others by function. Some are
motivated by a combination
of structure and function, while still others have no apparent
motivation
whatsoever.
An example of a structure-based
subclassification would be the three conjugation
classes of verbs in Spanish. Verbs in Spanish take
different endings
depending on whether the infinitive form of the verb ends in -ar, -ir, or -er.
There
is no meaning feature or set of features that correlates with the
various classes.
An example of a function-based subclassification would be certain
zero-plural
nouns in English, such as deer, fish, elk, sheep,
etc. While there are no obvious
structural similarities among nouns that take the zero plural, it
turns out that there
is a meaning, or functional, correlation – most of these nouns
refer to animals
that are traditionally hunted for food. Then again, the class of
English nouns that
take -en for the plural (oxen, children, and a few others) has neither a
structural
nor a functional motivation. It is just an historical relic from
an earlier stage of
English.
6. Constituent
structure
As linguistic structures become larger and
more complex, prose, position-class
diagrams, and process rules begin to lose their effectiveness as
means of representing
and analyzing them. In particular, structures known as phrases
and
clauses typically have a great deal of internal
complexity that is not amenable
to the same kind of analysis as words are. Units within such
larger structures may
vary in their positions, and units in the same position may have a
much wider
range of functions than elements of word structure tend to have.
For this reason
linguists usually make a fairly major distinction between
morphology (the study
of the shapes of words) and syntax (the study of how words clump
together in
phrases and clauses).
Of course, this distinction is really a
continuum. What is a syntactic pattern
at one historical stage of a language may become morphological at
a later stage
(seldom the reverse). Since language change over time rarely
proceeds in quantum
leaps, there are many situations in which a syntactic pattern is
“becoming”
morphological. In such cases either a syntactic or a morphological
analysis may
be useful. Furthermore, as we have seen in earlier chapters,
functions that are
accomplished in the syntax of one language may be accomplished
morphologically
in another. So in reality the distinction between morphology and
syntax is
not always absolutely clear, though it is often very useful.
In this chapter we will discuss how phrases and clauses tend to be
organized in
the world’s languages, and will present a couple of methods for
analyzing these
larger spans of patterned linguistic behavior.
7. Language
typology
A typology is simply a categorization of some range
of phenomena into
various types. To “typologize” something is to group its parts
into types. For
example, we often hear jokes like the following: “There are three
kinds of people –
those who can count, and those who can’t.” Typological linguists
are people who
like to group languages into well-defined and useful types.
But what makes a typology useful?Atypology is useful when it makes
“predictions”
about multiple characteristics of the items being typologized. For
example,
suppose we were to typologize motorized vehicles. Which would be
the most
meaningful typology, A or B?:
_ Typology A: bus, van, automobile, tractor
_ Typology B: red ones, green ones, blue
ones, white ones
If you know that a motor vehicle is a bus,
what else do you know about it?
Quite a lot actually – it is probably going to be a large vehicle,
with lots of seats,
designed primarily to carry people, etc. If, on the other hand,
you know some
random motor vehicle is blue in color, there is not much else you
can guess
about its characteristics. Therefore, typology A is more useful,
because it reflects
“clusters” of structural and functional characteristics that go
together, rather than
simply indicating isolated properties.
Turning to a linguistic example, we could
say that there are two kinds of
languages in the world – those that have the sound [r] in their
phonetic inventory
and those that don’t. However, knowing whether a language has an
[r] is not
likely to have many repercussions in other parts of the language,
therefore this is
not a particularly interesting or useful typology. However, there
are several other
linguistic typologies that have been very helpful to people
interested in exploring
the characteristics of the human mind. These are typologies that
identify clusters
of characteristics that languages are likely to possess.
The value of typologizing languages is
that it helps linguists understand the
range and limits of possible variation among human languages. If
logically possible
types are found to be very rare or nonexistent, that may provide
some insight
into how the human mind works. Thus language typology can give us
a “window”
on the mind and communication. To extend our non-linguistic
example, if we
typologized all the motorized vehicles in theworld according to
number of wheels,
we might find that there are no, or extremely few, vehicles with five
wheels
8. Grammatical
relations
Grammatical relations (GRs) are
structurally defined relations between words in
phrases and clauses. Common terms used to refer to particular
grammatical relations
are subject, direct object, indirect object,
ergative,
absolutive,
genitive, and oblique. Sometimes the oblique relation
(discussed below) is considered to be the absence of a grammatical relation.
Like other structural notions, GRs are defined independently of function (such
as semantics or topicality), though they clearly have
communicative functions.
Even as the structure of any tool is
logically distinct from (though intimately connected
to) its function, so GRs are logically distinct from the functions
that they
perform. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that GRs play
a significant role
in expressing meaningful distinctions, such as who is acting upon
whom, what is
topical, and so on.
A second important fact about GRs is that they are essentially relational concepts.
In other words, they don’t exist unless there are two elements
that are
related. A nominal element by itself does not “have” a grammatical
relation. It
is only when it occurs in a structure with a verb that we can say
that it is a
“subject” or an “object,” etc. In fact, it may be better to always
say “subject of”
or “object of” since these terms make it clear that there must be
another element
in the construction. The grammatical properties that identify GRs
are determined
by syntactic constructions, and not simply by semantic properties
of individual
nouns or verbs.
Here is an analogy from real life. A
concept like “boy” is not inherently relational,
because it depends solely on the characteristics of the
individual. The
concept of “brother,” on the other hand, is relational, because someone
can’t
be simply a brother
without reference to someone else. Getting
back to grammar,
a category like plurality is non-relational, because it usually
depends on
the semantic characteristics of the individual referent of a noun.
This semantic
characteristic is reflected structurally in many languages by some
kind of “plural
marking.” Subject, on the other hand, is a category that depends
on the structure
of the whole clause. A nominal element can only be the “subject
of” some other
grammatical element.
Sometimes the term argument is used to refer to any nominal that has
a grammatical relation to a verb, or to another noun.
9. Voice
and valence
Every language has constructions that
affect the alignment between semantic
roles and grammatical relations in clauses. Such constructions are
sometimes
referred to as voices. For example, in a typical active
voice construction
in English an AGENT is the subject of the clause and a PATIENT is
the object.
The passive voice creates a different argument structure,
one in which the
PATIENT bears the subject relation and the AGENT appears in an
oblique role:
(1) a. ACTIVE: Orna baked these cookies. Subject = AGENT
Object = PATIENT
b. PASSIVE: These cookies were baked by Orna. Subject = PATIENT
Oblique = AGENT
In this chapter we will use the concept of valence
to explore constructions
that affect the relationship between grammatical relations and
semantic roles.
These include constructions that traditionally fall under the
heading of voice,
though there are several valence-related constructions that are
not normally considered
voices. Nevertheless, because of their functional similarities,
and because
many languages treat valence-related constructions in structurally
similar ways,
it is often convenient to group them together for analytic or
expository purposes.
Valence
can be thought of as a semantic notion, a
syntactic notion, or a
combination of the two. Semantic valence refers to the number of participants
in the message-world scene normally expressed by a verb (see
chapter 4 on
verbs and their argument structures). For example, the verb eat in English has a
semantic valence of two, since for any given event of eating there
must be two
participants – something that eats and something that gets eaten.
If one of these
is missing from the scene itself, then it is hard to imagine
describing the scene as
an event of eating.
Grammatical
valence (or syntactic
valence) refers to the
number
of arguments present in any given clause (see chapter 8 for
discussion of the
term “argument”). The verb eat in
English may occur in a clause with a grammatical
valence of 1 or 2 depending on how the verb is used. In a clause
like
Calvin already ate there is no direct object, so the only core argument of the
verb refers to the “eater.” Nevertheless, in the scene expressed
by this clause, it
is understood that something is eaten. It’s just that the identity
of the eaten thing
is not known or is unimportant for the particular communicative
task at hand.
10.
Multi-clause constructions
In every language there exist different
ways of combining basic clauses to form
more complex structures. In this chapter we will discuss several
construction
types that involve combinations of clauses.
Most of the constructions described in
this chapter involve two clauses – one
independent clause and one or more dependent
clauses. An independent
clause is one that is fully inflected and capable of being used in
discourse on its
own. A dependent clause is one that depends on some other
proposition for at
least part of its inflectional
information.
For example, in the following
construction, clause 1b is dependent on clause a because the
subject and tense of
clause b are only understood via the subject and tense of clause
a:
(1) a. He came in, b. locking the door behind him.
Clause 1b by itself cannot naturally be
used in discourse on its own. Sometimes
fully inflected verbs are called finite verbs, whereas dependent verbs are termed
non-finite. However, this distinction must be
understood as a continuum, as
some verbs may be dependent in one respect, but independent in
another. Thus
we may talk about one verb being more finite
or less finite than another.
The following discussion will be organized according to six
general construction
types: (1) serial verbs, (2) complement
clauses, (3) adverbial
clauses, (4) clause chains, (5) relative clauses, and (6)
coordination. These six construction types are
arranged in such a way that
the earlier ones represent relatively “tight” grammatical
integration
between two verbs or clauses, whereas the later ones represent
“looser” grammatical
integration. Another way of describing this arrangement is in
terms of a
continuum in which one end is a single clause, and the other end
is two grammatically
distinct clauses. A given language may possess any number of
construction
types that fall somewhere in between these extremes (see figure
10.1).
The continuum illustrated in figure 10.1 also mirrors many
pathways of historical
change whereby “loose” syntactic structures become moretightly
knit over
time (see many of the articles in Traugott and Heine 1991).
No comments:
Post a Comment