American English Grammar

An Introduction

Seth R. Katz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000711547
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

American English Grammar introduces students to American English in detail, from parts of speech, phrases, and clauses to punctuation and explaining (and debunking) numerous "rules of correctness, " integrating its discussion of Standard American grammar with thorough coverage of the past sixty years' worth of work on African American English and other ethnic and regional non-Standard varieties. The book's examples and exercises include 500 real-world sentences and longer texts, drawn from newspapers, film, song lyrics, and online media as well as from Mark Twain, Stephen King, academic texts, translations of the Bible, poetry, drama, children's literature, and transcribed conversation and TV and radio shows. Based on twenty years of classroom testing and revision, American English Grammar will serve as a classroom text or reference that teaches students how to think and talk not only about the mechanics of sentences but also about the deep and detailed soul and nuance of the most widely used language in human history.

Chapter 1
Sentences; Parts of Speech and Their Phrases

1.1 Sentences: Subjects, Verbs, Verb Complements, and Sentence Modifiers

Traditionally, the study of grammar focuses on sentences without context, not on paragraphs or other sets of connected sentences, such as conversations. In actual use, sentences always work together with each other and the context (words, physical surroundings, experience, knowledge) to guide how we interpret their structure and the meanings of their words. Later in the book, we will also see that there are grammatical elements in sentences that serve to connect sentences to one another within—and even between—paragraphs. For the most part, this textbook will only use single-sentence examples to illustrate basic points about sentence structure and to help you learn to identify and analyze those structures. Exercises will use both artificial single sentences (the shallow end of the pool) and real-world texts taken from various sources (the deep end, where we usually swim). In our study of grammar, we will take several different approaches to the same material, each one further refining how we analyze sentences. Here is a first approach.

Sentences typically comprise four major constituents: the subject, the verb, the verb complement, and sentence modifiers. In general, sentences must have a subject and a verb: these constituents are obligatory. Typically, you can’t have a well-formed sentence in English without a subject and a verb.¹ Most verbs take some kind of complement: a constituent that completes the meaning of the verb. So, for example, in the sentence Nancy likes avocadoes, avocadoes is the complement. Without it, the sentence sounds incomplete: * Nancy likes (the asterisk is a conventional way to mark that an example is not grammatical—that it does not fit the blueprint of English). For a subset of verbs—e.g. smiles—a complement is not required: Nancy smiles needs no complement.

Sentence modifiers are optional: with or without them, a sentence can still be grammatically well formed. In the sentence Yesterday, Ed carried the groceries, yesterday is a sentence modifier. It is optional in that we can remove it, and we will still have a well-formed sentence: Ed carried the groceries.

Let’s drill down a little further. The easiest way to parse a sentence—to identify its constituent parts so as to analyze how it works—is to start with the verb, the word that names the action being performed by the subject. In the preceding example about Ed, the verb is carried, the only word in the sentence that names an action. The verb in a sentence may comprise more than one word: in a sentence like The groceries were being carried by Ed, the complete verb is were being carried. We will sometimes differentiate between the complete verb (e.g. were being carried) and its constituents, the main verb (e.g. carried) and auxiliary verbs (e.g. were and being; see Chapter 6).

Once you have found the verb, the next step in parsing a sentence is to ask Who or what did the action? In the case of the sentence Yesterday, Ed carried the groceries, the question is, Who or what carried? The answer to that question—Ed—names the subject of the verb. The subject of a verb is always some kind of nominal and most commonly a noun phrase (NP). An NP is a word or group of words comprising a noun (obligatory) and its dependent modifiers (optional); an NP can, among other functions, serve as the subject of a verb. We will abbreviate the phrase “noun phrase functioning as a subject” by the shorthand “NP:SUBJ,” where the colon means “functioning as” and “SUBJ” is an abbreviation for “Subject.” We will define NPs in more detail in Chapter 2. The complete NP:SUBJ—the noun and its modifiers—we call the complete subject; when we isolate the noun from the NP:SUBJ, we call the noun by itself the simple subject.

A good test for locating the subject of the sentence is

• The subject question test: Once you have identified a verb, ask Who or what, followed by the appropriate form of the verb. The answer will be the subject of the verb.

Taken together, the simple subject and the complete verb constitute the kernel sentence (e.g. Ed carried). It is often useful to identify the kernel sentence when we are puzzled as to what a sentence is about or when we are trying to revise a sentence for clarity or organization.

We must also distinguish between the form and function of sentence constituents. “NP” is a form, as are the categories identified by part-of-speech names (e.g. adjective, adverb, preposition, etc.). “Subject” is a function: a role an NP may perform within a sentence. In the sample sentence, Ed has the form of NP, and it functions as the SUBJ. As we will learn, NPs can have a great variety of different constituent structures: along with a noun, an NP can include a variety of modifiers with a variety of forms, but all NPs can fulfill the same functions within sentences. That is, part of what defines the form of an NP is the kind of functions it can perform.

Coming back to the example sentence, the phrase the groceries is, like Ed, an NP in form, comprising a noun (groceries) and a determiner (D) (the). The NP the groceries is functioning as a verb complement: it completes the sense or meaning of the verb carried. To identify the function of the NP the groceries, we need to ask, What did Ed carry? The answer to the question—in this case, the groceries—identifies a very common type of verb complement, a direct object (DO; see Chapter 7). We now have a first test for identifying verb complements:

• The verb complement question test: Once you have identified a verb and its subject, ask, Whom or what did the subject verb? The answer will be the complement of the verb—more specifically, the direct object (DO).

When we ask, Whom or what did Ed (subject) carry (verb)? the answer—the groceries—is the verb complement.²

Taken together, the verb and its complement (or complements: some verbs take more than one; see Chapter 7) and modifiers (verbs can take modifiers, just like nouns can; see Chapters 6) constitute a verb phrase (VP) functioning as the predicate of the sentence (VP:PRED). Sometimes we will refer to the verb and its complements and modifiers, taken altogether, as the complete predicate, while we will sometimes refer to the complete verb of a sentence, taken by itself, as the simple predicate.

Now you know how to identify the guts—the subject and predicate—of any sentence. You also know how to identify a common sort of verb complement. Many English sentences are about someone or something (named by an NP:SUBJ) doing something (an action named by a V) to someone or something (an NP:DO). English is thus often referred to as a SUBJECT-VERB-OBJECT (SVO) language since that is our preferred and predominant sentence order. Other languages prefer a different order for the major sentence constituents. In our study of English grammar, parsing the vast majority of sentences or clauses (a set of words that includes a subject and a predicate) will begin with asking the question, Who is doing what? or Who is doing what to whom? Sentences in English most commonly comprise an NP:SUBJ and a VP:PRED.

While subjects and predicates are obligatory in sentences, and most verbs require complements, the fourth major part of a sentence—sentence modifiers—are, as we noted above, optional. In our example sentence, Yesterday, Ed carried the groceries, yesterday is a sentence modifier. We know it is optional because, if we drop it from the sentence, the remaining string of words is still a well-formed sentence. In traditional grammar, yesterday would be analyzed as an adverb modifying the verb carried—telling when the carrying happened. But it’s not just that the carrying happened yesterday; it’s the specific incident of Ed carrying the groceries that happened yesterday. And, unlike the word the, which is tightly connected to the word groceries and cannot be moved away from groceries, yesterday is not “tied” closely to the verb carried. In the grammar we will study here, a modifier is a word that shapes or limits the meaning of its head (the word, phrase or clause it modifies) and that is tied to its head—that is, within the sentence, the modifier has to be located close to the constituent it modifies. While the cannot be moved away from groceries and still be understood as related to groceries, yesterday can potentially appear in three different places in the sentence without altering the meaning of the sentence:

• Yesterday, Ed carried the groceries.
• Ed carried the groceries yesterday.
• ? Ed, yesterday, carried the groceries.

Sentence modifiers like yesterday can, usually, appear at the beginning of the sentence; at the end of the sentence; and, often, between the subject and the predicate. The last example,? Ed, yesterday, carried the groceries, is, admittedly, a trifle odd; the question mark indicates that native speakers might find the sentence strange, though not necessarily unacceptable (as noted above, a sentence that is outright badly formed or unacceptable within the English blueprint will be mar...