Grammar – the biggest doing word of them all The thing to remember when you’re studying grammar is that you’ve been using it all your life without noticing. Grammar does its work with little fuss; it’s always there when you need it. If you didn’t already have a highly proficient understanding of English grammar, you wouldn’t be reading this article now. You can learn as much about grammar by thinking about what you know as you can from reading about impenetratable grammatical terms in textbooks. Start looking at the length of your own sentences – or perhaps the length of sentences in your favourite novel. Look at the ‘chunks’ that lie either side of a colon or a semi-colon? Think about questions like: Would I ever use a colon in a letter to my mother? How do I start my sentences? What does ‘Well, er…’ mean and why do I ke#ep saying it? When did I last say ‘although’ or ‘moreover’ or ‘nevertheless’? – what jobs do these words do? If someone says ‘We was…’ how is it that I understand exactly what they mean, even though it is regarded as non-standard. And who says it’s ‘non-standard’? I’d like to suggest two ways of looking at grammar: First think of it as what I call ‘joined-up thinking’. Grammar is easier than you think. It’s a mental system that works on your behalf to keep communication tidy. It tells you useful things like: what time things happened (verb tenses); where things are (prepositions); what’s what (nouns and their determiners); and how, when and where things happen (adverbs). Grammar fastens together all these bits into straight lines. Grammar stops the words going mad – and probably stops us from going mad too. Grammar joins up the parts: it pulls words together into structures that mean something. Grammar is a sentence generator, in both speech and in writing. It has to be a bit more precise in writing because your friendly face, expressive hands and tone of voice can’t be there to help the words along. We’ve already talked about what grammar does. You can also think of it as a kind of mental map which stops you getting lost. Whereas word meanings and pronunciations frequently change in the history of the language, grammar changes little. Otherwise, we wouldn’t know where we were, linguistically speaking. When you use grammar – as you always do – you make choices, often without thinking about them. You make psychological and social choices as well as linguistic choices. Your state of mind at the time will shape the grammar you choose. If you feel in charge of a situation the grammar you chose might include commands (or imperatives). If you’re not sure of the situation you might ask questions. If you feel hurt (or alarmed, or deliriously happy) you may well utter exclamations. When you’re having a good gossip you will exchange statements (also known as declaratives). Notice how much social psychology underlies all these grammatical choices. Do egotistical people use the first person more often? Do nosy people ask more questions? Do bossy people give more commands? The second way of looking at grammar is to say that it’s a language for talking about language – for naming the parts. The technical word for this is meta-language. Verbs express the action in a sentence, for example; nouns signify things; and pronouns tell us what’s what and who’s who. Terms like these are useful because they help you to describe what the grammar is doing as precisely as possible. Until you get used to it, using the terminology of grammar to name the parts will seem baffling. Don’t be put off by it, it won’t do you any harm. The more you use these terms, the easier you’ll find them. Grammar is not for sticking labels on words: it’s for observing words in action – and then finding out more. Try to understand the function or the effect of grammar first. It won’t be long before you understand what the structures of grammar are all about. Then these names like pronouns, conjunctions and nodal verbs, for example, won’t seem so baffling.
Non-standard, not sub-standard One problem with studying grammar is that people get too bothered about correctness. If you hear two children talking and one (Yorkshire born) says:
‘We’ve got to have us photos took this afternoon’; and the other (London born) replies: ‘They ain’t taking no photo of me’ we understand clearly what the children mean. On the surface there are different dialectical forms, often called non-standard grammar. But non-standard does not mean sub-standard. When you study grammar, the main thing is to collect it, not correct it. Your job is to observe it in action and to describe its functions and structures in the real world. Useful references: The Longman Reference Guide to A-level English B & G. R. Keith. A pocket size handbook of terminology Rediscover English Grammar David Crystal, Longman This article first appeared in emagazine, Issue 1, September 1998
Take a few adverbs and mix well. Alison Ross unpicks some of the complexities surrounding an apparently straightforward word class: the adverb. Students (those who are brave enough) often say ‘I can never remember the difference between an adjective and an adverb.’ If you are one of the smug ones who think there's no problem, perhaps you would offer a definition like this: – Adjectives describe nouns. – Adverbs describe verbs and are formed by adding ‘-ly’ to the end of adjectives. Simple? No, actually far more varied than that. Like most things in language, the rule works perfectly well in many cases, but never in the one you are concerned with at the moment. Here is an example that works well: They are slow workers. (Adjective describing a noun.) They work slowly. (Adverb describing a verb.) And here’s one that’s often quoted as a typical mistake, showing the general sloppiness of current language use: Come quick! The chip pan’s on fire! Now listen to the argument between the speaker and the person correcting them. – No, no, no. You can be a quick mover, but you move quickly. ‘Come quick’ is bad English. – But it sounds right. – You must add ‘-ly’, if it is an adverb. – Always? – Yes, that's the rule. – What about: ‘She's a fast mover. She moves fast.’? – Ah, that's an exception. We don't say, ‘She moves fastly.’ It doesn't sound right. – Exactly. I've just thought of another: ‘He’s a hard worker. He works hardly.’! – You can't say that. It means the opposite. – So, sometimes if you add ‘-ly’ to the adjective, the adverb means the opposite? You see that distinguishing adjectives from adverbs is not always as simple as checking whether there is an ‘ly’ at the end. There are many adverbs that are not formed from adjectives at all, particularly ones that describe where or when something happened. She lives downstairs. They raced yesterday. In fact, the category of adverb is rather like a bag labelled ‘miscellaneous’. Does the other part of the definition work: do adverbs describe verbs? The best you can say is that they sometimes do, but adverbs are often used to qualify adjectives: The beer was ridiculously expensive. When adverbs are used in this way, they are called ‘intensifiers’, because they can express varying degrees of whatever adjective you are using. The beer can range from ‘slightly expensive’ to ‘quite/
rather/ very/ exorbitantly expensive’. (Notice that the most common adverbs used as intensifiers are ‘quite’ and ‘very’, but neither end in ‘-ly’.) You could easily add twenty or more words to the range of possible intensifiers before the adjective ‘expensive’, but they do not each signify an exact degree. It would be hard to agree on whether ‘outrageously expensive’ was worse than ‘ludicrously expensive’. Instead of telling you something precise about the beer, the choice of intensifier often reveals something about the speaker/writer. It gives you clues about their social background, including such aspects as their age, gender, education, class and region. Just as Jilly Goolden (BBC Food and Drink programme) has a sharp palate for discerning different flavours of wines, you need a sharp palate for ‘tasting’ adverbs. Try yours out with these examples. How do you differentiate the speakers in each of these cases? It was awfully/jolly/really/incredibly/dead/right/well good. And a few expletives, that, perhaps, should be deleted: It was damn/bloody/f***ing good. If you are still confused about what an adverb is, you can see how much adverbs reveal about the changing nature of the English language and about its speakers. Alison Ross is Principal Moderator for AQA B Original Writing coursework. She is the author of The Language of Humour (Routledge) and AS Language and Literature for AQA B (Heinemann). This article first appeared in emagazine 14, December 2001.
Don’t take ‘do’ for granted Michael Rosen shows how there’s much more to the simple word ‘do’ than meets the eye. One of the strangest things about the first language we speak is that we rarely see how odd or peculiar it is, until we come to compare it with another language. In the meantime – and most of the time – we seem to go about our business thinking that what we say (and how we say it) is like air: it just happens. Take the word ‘do’ and the rest of its family – ‘does’, ‘did’, ‘doing’, ‘done’ and the negatives – ‘don’t’, ‘doesn’t’ and ‘didn’t’. Surely, nothing could be more normal, more straightforward than ‘do’? Here it is cropping up being ever so normal: ‘What are you doing tonight?’ ‘Homework.’ ‘I’ve done mine.’ ‘Usually I do karate on Wednesdays, but I’ll do my homework instead.’ You can see ‘do’ meaning three different things there. 1) In ‘What are you doing tonight?’ it means something very general, which if you give it its definition sounds very pompous – something like, ‘take part in any unspecified activity’. 2) In ‘I’ve done mine’, ‘do’ means, something like ‘finish’. 3) In ‘I do karate’ and ‘I’ll do my homework’, it means something like ‘going about the job of …’ So, normal it may be, but as it bats between us in everyday speech, it shifts about meaning different things. And the ones I’ve mentioned here aren’t the only ones. What’s much more peculiar about ‘do’ is that sometimes it doesn’t really have meaning. Instead, it’s easier to describe it as having a use or a function. Take this: ‘Do you eat meat?’ ‘I used to, but I don’t now.’ In most languages, if you want to ask a question, (or at least sound a bit questioning) you have several ways of doing it. One way, is to say something that isn’t a question and then add on a sound, a word or a phrase at the end. ‘You’re his sister, innit?’ ‘Great match, eh?’ ‘This is the last exam, right?’ ‘He’s a muppet, isn’t he?’ In French, as well as having a phrase that means ‘innit’, that you can put on the end, you’ve got another one you can use at the beginning. So, there’s ‘n’est-ce pas’ for the end, and ‘est-ce que’ (which means ‘is it that’) for the beginnings. Another way we ask questions is to put the words into a special questioning order (the way we make questions is called the ‘interrogative’). ‘You’re hungry’ isn’t a question unless we say it making our voice go up at the end. But ‘Are you hungry?’ is a nearly always a question. (Note: nothing to do with what I’m talking about here, but you might like to have a moment of simple fun trying to say ‘are you hungry’ so that it isn’t a question!) But, can we make questions this way with all English verbs? Let’s try it: ‘You can play chess.’ ‘Can you play chess?’ ‘You’ve eaten my chips.’ ‘Have you eaten my chips?’
‘You love ice cream.’ ‘Love you ice cream?’ The first two sound fine, don’t they, but the last one sounds very odd. In the first two examples, I’ve been able to ‘invert’ (i.e. turn round) the verb to make a question, but in the third I haven’t been able to. So how can I ask you if you love ice cream in a way that doesn’t sound odd? There are the ways I described earlier, using such things as ‘innit?’, ‘eh’, and ‘right’. But I could also say this: ‘Do you love ice cream?’ and ‘You love ice cream, don’t you?’ As you can see, the word ‘do’ appears on the scene. In other words, if we are using a verb that can’t be inverted, it seems that I have to bring in ‘do’ to do the job. Rather than take my word for it, you could try drawing up a list of the verbs that let you invert, and verbs that don’t let you invert. I said earlier that on some occasions, ‘do’ can mean something and on others it just seems to have a use or function. ‘Do you love ice cream’ is an example of where ‘do’ has more function than meaning. Are there others? Well, I’ve already slipped it in, in what I’ve written earlier. Look at the sentence a few lines above this, that I ended like this: ‘… verbs that let you invert, and verbs that don’t let you invert.’ ‘Don’t’ (which of course is a compressed way of saying ‘do not’) can sometimes be one of these functional ‘dos’. Look at this: I can say, ‘I walked through the park’. But how can I say this is not what I did? In French and German, you can do it by putting in a negative word (or two). In German, this is ‘nicht’, in French it’s ‘ne’ and ‘pas’, though in speech you can usually do it with ‘pas’ on its own. So can we do this in English? ‘I walked not through the park.’ That sounds odd. The usual way we would say it is like this: ‘I didn’t walk through the park.’ There’s one of the ‘do’ words again. To make things negative, we have to bring in ‘do’ (or one of its family, in this case ‘did’). ‘I like the beach.’ ‘I don’t like the beach.’ ‘He uses a calculator.’ ‘He doesn’t use a calculator.’ As I said at the beginning, the language we use every day, can seem as normal as air. What’s odd about using ‘do’ to make questions and to make negatives is that it seems to be something that happens in English but not in other languages. This gives rise to a couple of questions. Why does English have this special use of the ‘do’ word, and when did it first appear? There have been some very complicated attempts to work out the ‘why’, most of which I’m not convinced by. On the ‘when’ question, it’s easier to see. ‘Do’ being used for questions and negatives turned up in the fourteenth century, about the time Chaucer was writing. At that time, you could also use ‘do’ in one more way: if I say, ‘I do go bird-watching’, you’ll assume, I think, that I’m emphasising something. You could tell me that I don’t go bird-watching, so I’m saying that I do. (That, by the way is the third functional use of ‘do’ – emphasis.) But when ‘do’ first appeared in English for making negatives and asking questions, you could say something like ‘I do go bird-watching’ without meaning it in some emphatic way. You could say ‘I do go’ and ‘I do eat’ and the like. As it happens, on Word of Mouth on Radio 4, we told the story of ‘do’, with the help of linguist Diane Nelson from the University of Leeds and she pointed out that the ‘I do eat’ way of using ‘do’, died out in the early nineteenth century. I had thought this matter was one of those items on Word of Mouth
that people listen to and let pass by without comment. Not so. Letters came rushing in. From East Anglia, Cornwall and South Wales, people wrote to us saying that people not only use ‘do’ in the ‘I do eat’ way, but also as a command, and as meaning such things as ‘if’ and ‘or’ and ‘then’. People wrote in saying that they hear people saying things like, ‘You do get on my nerves, you do!’ Geoff Pleasance from Ipswich told us that his Dad used to order him about by saying, ‘Do you get on now!’ Ann Warner from Norfolk said that it means ‘then’ when people say, ‘Had I known, do I should have gone.’ Sam Lanyon from Cornwall told us that people in Cornwall use the phrase ‘do ee’ on the end of sentences where it can mean ‘do you?’ as in ‘You listen to the radio, do ee?’ John Ling from Norfolk said that he’s heard people say, ‘You better put that scarf on, do you’ll get cold.’ On the matter of commands, Geoffrey Hunter told us that as Admiral Nelson was dying at the battle of Trafalgar, he not only said ‘Kiss me Hardy!’ He also said, ‘Do you anchor, Hardy.’ Some historians thought that this was a question, but the only way in which it makes sense, is for Nelson to be commanding Hardy to anchor the boat, before the new Admiral took over. Any of us speaking standard English, use ‘do’ to ask questions, to make negatives and to be emphatic. Perhaps you know someone who uses ‘do’ in some of these other regional ways, as well. But there’s somewhere else you can look for some of the things I’ve been talking about here – in Shakespeare. There you’ll find people asking questions without using ‘do’; using ‘do’ for statements without being emphatic, ‘do’ for commands and requests, as well as all the modern ways. By the way: Shakespeare pronounced it as ‘doe’, rhyming with ‘slow’, just as we do when we say, ‘don’t’ but not when we say ‘does’ which we rhyme with ‘fuzz’! And all that’s odd too, isn’t it? Finally, you’ll be glad to know that linguists have come up with a name for the functional use of ‘do’, that I’ve been talking about here. It’s called the ‘do-support’. That sounds to me like some kind of strange underwear, but it's not me that comes up with these terms. Michael Rosen’s series Word of Mouth (BBC Radio 4) on the uses and abuses of spoken English is on Fridays at 4pm and repeated the following Sunday at 8.30pm.
This article first appeared in emagazine 18, December 2002
Investigating (the) Definite Article Alison Ross argues that exploring the definite article is far more than a ‘trainspotting obsession with language’. The Eddie Izzard tour of the same name meant that I could proclaim my passion for grammar wearing a T-shirt with the words DEFINITE ARTICLE across the front. So the most languageconscious comedian of the times has made a grammatical term familiar, but people still asked, ‘What is a definite article, anyway?’ It’s the most common word in the English language. The Birmingham Corpus, showing the frequency of occurrence of English words, has ‘the’ as the top-ranking word, followed closely by ‘of’, ‘and’, ‘to’ and ‘a’, which is the indefinite article. In fact, most of the top 100 words are grammatical words, as opposed to ‘content’ words: the only main verbs are ‘said’, ‘do’, ‘think’, ‘know’, ‘get’, ‘see’, and ‘go’, and there are only two nouns – ‘people’ and ‘way’. So far, this may seem like a trainspotting obsession with language. Surely it’s the content words that express meanings, so we can ignore these little words that don’t add anything useful to the language. It’s true that children manage to communicate perfectly well without grammatical words in the early stages, saying things like ‘Duck swim on water’ rather than ‘A duck is swimming on the water’. The use of articles certainly trips up learners of English, who find it difficult to work out the rules for their use. Why can you say ‘I went to town’ but not ‘I went to city’? Whenever people are being economical with words, for example on written signs and headlines, the articles are missed out: ‘ENTRY WITHOUT (a) PERMIT FORBIDDEN’; ‘(a) GIRL LOST ON (the) MOORS’. In cases like these, it’s easy to understand why articles are regarded as having only a grammatical function. Yet their use can often express fine distinctions of meaning. Think, for example of the difference between these two utterances: ‘He is going to school’ and ‘He is going to the school’. Without the definite article, it expresses a daily habit, whereas the second is a one-off visit. There is a similar, but more crucial, distinction between ‘going to prison’ and ‘going to the prison’. As well as distinguishing between a prison sentence and a prison visit, the use or omission of articles can be a marker of your social class. The Times newspaper used to run a weekly column answering queries on points of etiquette. Worried aristocrats and social climbers sent in their pleas for guidance on how to be distinguished from the riff-raff in this changing world. One query (4 April, 1998) went something like this: I have always been led to believe that, in polite society, one invited people ‘to coffee’ not ‘for a coffee’. I was not surprised to hear lower class characters in The Archers, such as Shula, invite people ‘for a coffee’, but I heard even the Pembertons, surely people from the top-drawer, use the indefinite article. What is the correct form? The answer came without hesitation: It is still the done thing to omit the indefinite article and invite people ‘to coffee’. Well, thank goodness we have all been put straight on that one! It will be left to The Mirror to provide Lesson 2 and explain that ‘inviting someone in for a coffee’ may have quite a different subtext, if it occurs at the end of an evening out. Alison Ross is Principal Moderator for AQA B Original Writing coursework. She is the author of The Language of Humour (Routledge) and AS Language and Literature for AQA B (Heinemann). This article first appeared in emagazine 15, February 2002.
Is Love a Doing Word? - stative and dynamic verbs Alison Ross explores the different roles of the ‘doing’ word. A song by Massive Attack begins ‘Love, love is a verb. Love is a doing word.’ It will warm the heart of English teachers to hear that grammar has a place in the popular music of the nineties. In fact, Massive Attack are making a very interesting point about what verbs are. By repeating the usual definition of a verb, they also manage to suggest that it is not always the case that a verb – in this example, ‘love’– is a ‘doing word’. Many common verbs do not seem to be expressing an action or deed. In ‘This parcel contains breakable goods’ the adjective ‘breakable’ suggests doing something, much more than the verb ‘contains’. The most common verb ‘to be’ lacks any sense of action in ‘I was tired/ bored’ etc. This verb, and many others, express states more than actions: ‘I feel’/ ‘you look’/ ‘she seems’/ ‘he appears’. For this reason, they are called ‘stative’ verbs to distinguish them from ‘dynamic’ verbs, like ‘kick’, ‘eat’, ‘brush’. Seem quite straightforward so far? The trouble is that this definition involves us in philosophical questions: if you say ‘I love x’ are you expressing a state that you are in, or something that you do, some loving actions? It is often just the former; think of the thousands who swore they ‘loved’ Princess Diana. The singer from Massive Attack wants it to be the latter. There is a more reliable way of recognising stative verbs – they are not used in the present continuous ‘-ing’ form. We do not say ‘I am wanting a motorbike’ or ‘You are seeming very tired’. We can’t say ‘I am liking football’ but we can say ‘I am enjoying football’. The second verb suggests much more active participation. Does this sort out whether ‘love’ is a stative or dynamic word? Think about whether you would say: ‘I love their new CD’ or ‘I am loving their new CD’ With inanimate objects, ‘love’ seems to be a stative word. But, just as people do not confine themselves to one mode and can adapt and change as necessary, so can words in a language. Although there is a difference in meaning, it is possible to say either ‘I love you’ or ‘I am loving you’ In the second case, love is indeed a ‘doing word’. Notice the subtle change in meaning between other pairs: ‘I feel sick’ and ‘I am feeling sick’ ‘The band appear jaded’ and ‘The band are appearing soon’ There is another way to distinguish stative from dynamic verbs. Stative verbs are not followed by a direct object, but by a complement. This definition doesn’t help much, unless you know these terms, but you will sense the difference in the examples: ‘Jane became a doctor’ and ‘Jane kicked a doctor’ The difference is most striking if the verb is apparently the ‘same’ word, as in this example: ‘He smelt awful’ and ‘He smelt a rose’ In the second sentence of each pair, there is another person or object, which is directly affected by the verb. In the first sentence, there is only one person involved and there is some extra information (complement) given about them after the verb. Alison Ross is Principal Moderator for AQA B Original Writing coursework. She is the author of The Language of Humour (Routledge), AS Language and Literature for AQA B and A2 Language and Literature for AQA B (Heinemann).
This article first appeared in emagazine 16, April 2002.
The Power of the Passive Michael Rosen investigates the way in which grammar can be used to manipulate our presentation of events. The whereabouts of Osama bin Laden is unknown. Do you notice anything particularly strange about that sentence? Something slightly nonsensical or illogical? Language has a way of assuming things and it can do this in ways we are not always aware of. A person writing a sentence or a passage can assume that the people reading what he’s writing are of a particular kind. There! I’ve done it just there: I wrote ‘what he’s writing’, instead of ‘he or she’. I assumed that a writer would be male. So what assumptions are in the sentence, ‘The whereabouts of Osama bin Laden is unknown’? It assumes that at the moment anyone is reading the sentence, they do not know where bin Laden is. That’s anyone alive in the world. The words ‘unknown’ and ‘not known’ have the sense of ‘not known to any human anywhere’, as in, say, ‘there is no known cure for malaria’. Clearly, this didn’t apply to bin Laden. Presumably, he knew where he was, along with a group of his followers. So why do many of us hear a sentence like that without instantly finding it odd or illogical? It was published in Western newspapers in the context of what Western security forces were intending to do in Afghanistan. No sentence stands entirely on its own. It is, if you like, always coloured by what’s being said or written around it. So, hidden in the sentence, is a sense that what was being spoken about, was a Western point of view i.e. ‘bin Laden’s whereabouts is unknown to the West.’ Even so, without that context, (as when I presented you with the question at the opening of this article), were you immediately struck with how illogical it was? Or did you, like I did when I first read it, simply accept it as true? If so, then that’s because a wider context to the bin Laden sentence was not simply the other sentences around it, but also the context you bring to bear when you read it: who you are, what you think, where you live and so on. Another question that linguists are interested in, though, is whether all this is aided in some way or another by the grammar. The verb in the bin Laden sentence is ‘is unknown’. As you probably know already, this is what’s known as the ‘passive voice’. Many, but not all, verbs can be expressed in either the ‘active’ or ‘passive’ voice. ‘I dug the garden’ is active. It is called active because the subject of the verb (here it is ‘I’) is being literally active, digging. ‘The garden was dug by me’ is passive. It’s called passive because the subject, (here it’s ‘the garden’) is having something done to it – it is being dug. What’s interesting is that when we use the passive voice in real situations, in real pieces of conversation and writing, things get much more complicated. You’ll notice that in the garden sentence I used the phrase ‘by me’. You could say that this is the ‘agent’ of the sentence. I did the digging. In the bin Laden sentence, you could, of course, insert an agent. ‘The whereabouts of bin Laden is unknown … to the coalition’s security forces.’ But when I read it in a newspaper, no agent was mentioned. Likewise, listening to reports of the downfall of Jeffrey Archer, I heard the sentence: ‘Archer was regarded as a hero.’ No agent was included. It didn’t say, ‘Archer was regarded by many as a hero.’ Nor, as it happens, was there a context in the sentences around the item that suggested who exactly regarded Archer as a hero. Going back to the garden sentence, you only have to open a science text book or a young child’s information book to find many passive voice sentences with no agent mentioned: ‘The letters are taken to a conveyor belt’ or ‘The flask was placed over a flame’. Neither sentence carries any information about who does the action. Who took the letters to the conveyor belt? Who placed the flask over a flame? In this way, we can use language to make people invisible. The ‘flask sentence’ is how experiments are written up to make them sound objective and factual. My feeling about the conveyor belt sentence is that many of the ways in which we describe the jobs that are done in everyday life, end up making the people who do them invisible, for example: ‘Dinner will be served at 7’ or ‘The shelves were stacked after hours.’
But the verbs I’ve used here are all verbs involving action. Verbs can also express a mental or physical state: ‘I feel good’, ‘I like him’. Some of these can be made passive as well – with interesting results. If you study History, you may well come across a regular standby for text book writers: ‘it was felt that …’. ‘It was felt that Wolsey had grown too powerful.’ Felt by whom? Henry VIII? A peasant farmer in Derbyshire? You may also come across, ‘he was seen to be …’, ‘it was known that …’, ‘it is often regarded that ...’, ‘it has been stated that …’ and so on. What’s more, this whole passive voice way of writing can be supported by other verbs that aid and abet the tone. This can be done by using active verbs like ‘want’, ‘wish’, ‘dislike’, ‘desire’, ‘believe’, ‘feel’; general nouns like ‘people’, ‘experts’, ‘commentators’, ‘researchers’, along with adjectives and determiners like ‘respected’, ‘most’, ‘ordinary’, ‘well-known’, ‘many’, ‘respectable’, ‘accepted’. Put all that together and you get phrases like, ‘Most reasonable people believe that …’, ‘Many respected commentators feel that …’ and ‘Most ordinary people want …’. In your own essay writing you may have learnt the phrases, ‘research has shown that …’, ‘historians have claimed that …’ and ‘it is often said that …’. So what’s going on here? My view is that writing and speech like this are all ways in which we try to make what we say sound truthful, important and right. At the very moment we do this, we try to escape from making what we say sound like personal opinion, or the opinion of the speaker’s/writer’s social group. That said, there is another clever word in the wordbank: ‘we’. ‘We’ ought to contradict what I’ve been saying here. At first glance, it’s a personal word, telling the listener/reader who is saying or thinking what. Listening to newscasts during the war in Afghanistan, I hear ‘we’ meaning something different. In interviews with politicians, journalists seem to find it difficult to use phrases like ‘the British government’, ‘the British armed forces’ and the like. Instead they tend to use the word ‘we’. ‘Are we sending in ground troops?’ ‘What are we saying to the Americans?’ ‘We’ has a way of being very friendly and inclusive, whilst at the same time not offering you much choice about it. ‘And we don’t do things like that in this school, do we?’ (!) Michael Rosen’s series Word of Mouth (BBC Radio 4) on the uses and abuses of spoken English is on Fridays at 4pm and repeated the following Sunday at 8.30pm. This article first appeared in emagazine 15, February 2002.
When single words are not enough Alison Ross looks at the way noun phrases are used in advertising and other aspects of contemporary culture. In Sheffield I saw a flyer pasted up on a wall advertising a night of music. But it gave me more information than the single word – music. Nouns, as the simple definition goes, are ‘naming words’, but the single word name often works as an umbrella term embracing a vast range of types. Music can be described as classical music, pop music, rock music. In grammatical terminology, these are noun phrases, using an adjective such as classical or pop(ular) or another noun – rock – to define the concept more precisely. Even this is not enough for the music afficionado – is the music hard rock, glam rock, punk or post-punk? This particular evening was aimed at people who have a more sophisticated taste in music than me; it was ANGST-RIDDEN MELODIC SCREAMY METAL-CORE. I didn’t go. I like melodic, love angst-ridden, but balked at screamy and metal. Still, I appreciate the way that this complex noun phrase gave me enough detailed information to decide if this was the night for me. Similarly with adjectives. Venues often have dress-codes, for example ‘smart’ or ‘informal’, but what I consider smart or informal may turn out to be quite unsuitable. Bar Gaia in Manchester defines the style of dress for their evening of comedy much more precisely as ‘RELAXED INFORMAL COOL’ which ensured I did not turn up in my old tracksuit (very relaxed and informal, but not cool at all) and hope to get in. Sometimes we may suspect that the complexity of the phrase adds an aura of excitement as part of a marketing strategy, rather than an honest attempt to define precisely. Furniture warehouses do this as clumsily as their garishly coloured TV adverts: Bargain sofa hunters. If you missed the DFS December Sale, Double Discount Boxing Day Sale, January Clearance Sale and the February End of Winter sale, don’t worry – the Spring Sale starts in March. Has anyone ever had the chance to buy a sofa that wasn’t marked down in a sale? An important point to notice is that – contrary to intuition – it is often not adjectives, but nouns that are used to modify other nouns in phrases. The head word ‘SALE’ is progressively modified and defined with only the word ‘double’ as a possible contender for the label ‘adjective’. Advertising copywriters for cosmetic products use the noun phrase more skilfully. As pounds are added to the price of simple creams or powders, so are the modifiers. You might be able to buy Bath Salts at Poundstretcher and pour salts into your bath, but if you want a luxury experience at bath time you will pay extra for Hydroterapia Detoxifying Moisturised Sea Salts with only the vaguest notion of what ‘hydroterapia’ means, or how a handful of powder can both detoxify and moisturise. I, personally, prefer the sea to be defined more precisely and pay more for Dead Sea Salts. The naming of products must work in step with the buyers’ psychology, happily embracing the increasing complexity of the names until that seems passé and it is time to see simplicity as a virtue. Lipstick names are going for the single word, suggestive of colour occasionally, but more often of attitude, with violence outdoing glamour with the suggestive noun phrase thrown in as an experiment: Fire Down Below. The choice between single-word or more complex noun phrase is often governed by the needs of fashion, rather than precision, as the changing fashion of band names shows. Back in the fifties, bands were described in a straightforward way: Joe Loss and his Orchestra; Acker Bilk and the Paramount Jazz Band. There were remnants of this in the sixties: Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, but the noun phrase pattern was more commonly The ______s, as in The Beatles, The Rolling Stones. Bands became less plainly descriptive with names such as Pink Floyd and Procul Harem and then abandoned the notion of a name at all with statements like Frankie Goes to Hollywood. The search for more unusual names became outdated and there was a return to simplicity with single
noun phrases such as Pulp, Blur and Oasis in the nineties. The new millennium seems to embrace the fashion concept of retro with a look backwards to the sixties style of The Strokes, The Hives, The Vines. Book titles were examined in an article by Barbara Bleiman (emagazine 15) and names of haircuts by Michael Rosen (emagazine 16). The Word Spy (www.logophilia.com/ WordSpy) is a dictionary that collects newly created compound nouns and noun phrases like: Big hair house (pretentious mansion) Shoegazing (introverted guitar style) Sleep camel (workaholics who stock up on sleep by slumbering all weekend). Students of English Language could investigate the currents of fashion in naming in another field of contemporary culture. Send any articles on your findings to the usual address. Alison Ross is Principal Moderator for AQA B Original Writing coursework. She is the author of The Language of Humour (Routledge), AS Language and Literature for AQA B and A2 Language and Literature for AQA B (Heinemann).
This article first appeared in emagazine 17 September 2002
Arguing about nouns Michael Rosen suggests that when grammar meets the real world, even the process of naming becomes a tricky business. You may have heard people say something like this: ‘I like him. He calls a spade, a ‘spade’.’ If the expression is new to you, then I expect it’s one of those phrases that sounds simple but is very annoying. You might feel like saying, ‘Of course, he calls a spade, a ‘spade’, what else should he call it? A watermelon? A fried egg? A spade is a spade.’ This gets right to the heart of what language can and can’t do. Human beings invented an object that digs in the ground and they gave it a name – ‘spade’. We say that this naming word is a ‘noun’ which means that it can slot in alongside thousands of other naming words, doing what naming words do. But what do they do? Clearly, they are an important part of language’s job of distinguishing one thing, one action, one feeling from another. In emag 21, I tried to show how the naming of something as seemingly simple as a sandwich is really a very complicated matter of classification and definition. Every bit of naming and identifying is really a matter of including and excluding. If I see something and say that it’s a bottle, then everything else is not a bottle. We can also look at nouns as being (1) the things that help our utterances to hang together and make sense. The newspaper headline ‘Man Bit Dog’ is a simple sentence or ‘clause’. As you probably know we call ‘man’ the subject of a clause and the ‘dog’ the object. (You’ll have to put out of your heads all the other meanings you know for the words ‘subject’ and ‘object’ here!) In most simple clauses and utterances, a subject (or subjects) does something to an object (or objects). ‘You kicked me’, ‘Melissa ate my apples’ and so on. When we use the verb ‘to be’, we use the word ‘subject’ but (2) the term for the noun that comes after the verb ‘to be’, we call a ‘complement’. ‘He is a fool’, ‘You’re a genius’. ‘Fool’ and ‘genius’ are the complements. Nouns also (3) appear in phrases as the things, processes and people doing an action or on the receiving end of it: ‘I was hit by a boomerang’, ‘He gave the job to Harry’. In phrases like this, they can also be where something is placed: ‘in the water’, ‘on the table’. We also (4) use nouns for commanding, greeting, demanding, asking, interrupting, exclaiming and swearing. ‘Door!’, ‘Mary!’, ‘Waiter?’,’Rubbish!’, ‘Bollocks!’ When we’re talking to each other informally, nouns crop up all the time without other words attached to them: ‘What’s that?’ ‘A mouse.’ ‘Why are you fed up?’ ‘Boyfriend.’ ‘How did you break your leg?’ ‘Football.’ These are (5) single simple statements, often answers, but sometimes indications of something seen, like ‘Bus!’, ‘The smell!’ We can call these five ways of nouns behaving in the language as ‘functions’. By the way, there are different ways of breaking nouns down into categories. Here’s one of them: common nouns, proper nouns, abstract nouns, collective nouns and pronouns. The pronouns are: I, me, thou, thee, you, he, she, it, him, her, we, us, they and them. Proper nouns are the names of places and people, usually written in English with a capital letter: London, Maria and the like. Now, what I’ve said so far doesn’t cause much of an argument, though you might find some people not wanting to call (4) and (5) anything much different from (1), (2) and (3). Such people say that those exclamations and simple statements imply a set of other words going with them, for example ‘That is rubbish!’, ‘My boyfriend made me fed up’, ‘There’s the bus’. I’m of the view that what’s said or written is what’s said or written and has to be judged like that. Even so, you can see that what I’ve done here is select a part of language (nouns) and looked at what they do. This, for many people, is what ‘grammar’ and ‘linguistics’ is all about: naming parts and saying what they do. It’s a bit like clothes: This is a raincoat. It keeps off the rain. I hang it on a hook. This is a belt. It keeps my trousers up. I keep it in a drawer. If I was a teacher in the nineteenth century I could hit you with it. That’s naming and function too. We do this naming and function game with a lot of things – engines, the human body, climate. This is the heart, it pumps blood round the body. This is the brake. When applied, it stops the car. A perfect system? So all this is a way of looking at language as a system. But systems break down. Sometimes it’s because we haven’t built them properly, or they wear out, or we’ve come up with a scheme that doesn’t exactly match what’s really going on. Computers crash, cars run into each other, climate
doesn’t do what we forecast, and so on. Does language do any of this? The most obvious way, from a linguist’s point of view, in which the system breaks down is if the language doesn’t behave in the way we say that it does. Consider this: if I say, ‘What are you doing?’ and you answer: ‘Running’, what kind of word is ‘running’? ‘Running’ is clearly the name of the action that you’re doing. It ought then to be a noun. But it’s also part of the verb ‘to run’. It’s the part that is known as the ‘present participle’, or an ‘ing’ word as we call it in primary school. They appear like this: ‘I am running’, ‘I have been running’, ‘I was running’ as a way of showing a continuous process. But we can use them on their own, as I’ve shown. Are they nouns, or should we call them something else? If we call them something else, will that term also cover the occasions we use them like this: ‘I don’t want to see you running all over the place’, ‘I remember him eating chips’. Or is that different again? Another area of difficulty arises with a phrase like ‘telephone box’. Some might want to say that ‘telephone’ is a way of describing the ‘box’ even though ‘telephone’ is usually a noun. So this school of thought would make ‘telephone’ an adjective. Others would want to say that in reality, a ‘telephone box’ is a single entity. We never go past a ‘telephone box’ and call it a ‘box’, so we should call it a ‘compound noun’, as if it had a hyphen in it or had become one word like ‘watermelon’. But is there another way in which the system breaks down? This happens most obviously in times of conflict, as has been highlighted very recently. Nouns and naming in conflict and war In war, things become more serious. It’s not only a question here of whether such-and-such an action qualifies for being called something. It’s the terms themselves that are debated. You may have seen that in recent times a phrase that has appeared is ‘collateral damage’. It’s a term that the army has used. Literally, it means the kind of damage that occurs alongside or along with the main damage. So, if a bomb drops and destroys a building, it may also destroy a lot of other things. So far, so good. But then it was discovered that this was a term that the military was using to describe the deaths of human beings. Instead of saying, say, ‘four people died’, a military spokesperson might say, ‘There was some collateral damage.’ This way of naming, some have said, is a way of hiding the deaths, and it turns human beings and human life, into nothing more than a side-effect, a process. The two opposing sides in a conflict will, almost certainly, use different terms to describe what’s going on. Take Ireland. The different sides of the conflict have different ways of describing themselves, each other, the territories, the cities, the processes and so on. So there is ‘Northern Ireland’ ‘The North’, ‘The Five Counties’, and ‘Ulster’ used by different parties to describe the same piece of physical territory. There is ‘Londonderry’, ‘Derry’ and ‘Derry City’ to describe the same city. Behind each of these terms are hundreds of years of history. The naming itself is in dispute and has been for all these years. There is then an archaeology behind each of these terms that will be revealed to those in the know the moment I use them. In the Middle East, you will hear the terms ‘Israel’ and ‘the Palestinians’, but some who don’t want Israel to exist might call it the ‘Zionist state’ and some on the other side say that the ‘Palestinians’ don’t exist. The Israelis call the army that you see in action on your TV the ‘Israel Defence Force’. The people who live on the West Bank call it the ‘army of occupation’. And the naming of historical events is in dispute too. The people who call themselves Palestinians (and would like the rest of the world to call them that), describe the events that took place in 1947, and 1948 as the ‘naqba’ or catastrophe. The Israeli government and most Israelis simply refer to this time as the ‘War of Independence’. Now, all this may seem a million miles from questions of grammar but, at the same time, such disputes remind us that some of the basic functions I’ve talked about, are themselves in dispute. You’ll remember that I said that nouns are mostly naming words. But this makes the process seem very neutral and part of a general consensus. By and large people don’t argue over the system of having naming words, though they do argue over whether perhaps it would be more useful to talk about ‘noun phrases’ rather than nouns. Even so, people do argue over whether what you say something is, is in fact what it is; over what kind of name you want to give it; whether it should even be called a name (‘Don’t label me!’) … and many more things. Maybe calling a spade a spade isn’t quite as straightforward as it seems. Michael Rosen is a poet and broadcaster. He presents Word of Mouth on Radio 4.
This article first appeared in emagazine 22, December 2003
How on earth do they do it? An extra-terrestrial view of syntax and phonology David Adger imagines what human language might look like to alien beings as a way of revealing the key role that syntax and phonology play. There you are, in the library, studying for your English Language A Level. You’ve done all the interesting bits: language and gender, sociolinguistics, discourse, and now it’s come to phonology and syntax. Why do I have to study this, you think, as your eyes begin to droop, and your head begins to nod and you begin to dream of a galaxy far, far away … FROM: The Director, Gargoplex Institute, Alpha Centauri TO: Chief Exo-Scientist Jenl Itstre VIA: Direct Telepathocrystal Network RE: New Mission New discovery made on planet 3, system 3.387. Species (designation Yu-Man), highly successful within biosphere, developed intelligence (level 2), culture (level 2.1) and technology (level 2.2), yet apparently no telepathic ability. Raises severe theoretical problems for doctrine 6.8 of Gargoplexic Code: Intelligence Culture Technology (ICT) count above level 2 requires communication; sophisticated communication is possible only via telepathy; therefore level 2 intelligence requires telepathy. Council is worried about ethical questions relating to experimentation on non-telepathic beings, and about apparent support the existence of Yu-Mans gives for Anti-Vivisectionist Movement. Please investigate immediately.
FROM: C.E.S Jenl Itstre TO: Director, GI, Alpha Centauri VIA: DTN RE: re: New Mission – Report 1 Have entered orbit. Confirm intelligence, culture and technology levels. Species seems to have highly developed communication abilities. No telepathy observed. Hypothesis: communication system is simple symbolic, associating one external sign with one thought (cf. Report ‘Octihydras of Glarg: 7, 203 tentacular positions for 7, 203 distinct messages’. Octihydras classified below level 2 on general ICT count.). Perhaps Yu-Mans simply have many external signs? Will determine nature of external physical signs relevant to species. No tentacles observed. FROM: C.E.S Jenl Itstre TO: Director, GI Alpha Centauri VIA: DTN 6.8.9 RE: re: New Mission – Report 2 Exciting new discovery. Like many other species on planet 3, species Yu-Man’s physical manifestation of thought is not visual nor olfactory, as is usual for lower species across the galaxy (cf. Report ‘Lower Xenomorph Communication’, subsection 3.3.45). Unbelievably, it involves instead the manipulation of orifices for oxygen intake and food intake to create pressure waves in the air. Such systems have been hypothesised before, but it has always been assumed that creatures would find it too difficult to extract the relevant air pressure modulations from general noise and that such physical signs would thereby be impossible to use as the basis of communication systems (see Itstre and Itstre ‘On the impossibility of sound based communication’. Report GI). RE: re: New Mission – Report 3 Troubling discovery. As is well known, simple symbolic systems are capable of only having a finite number of possible messages (Istre and Grofr ‘Finiteness and Communication’, GIM Monographs, AC1). Species Yu-Man have no such limitation – they can communicate an apparently infinite number of sophisticated thoughts between each other without telepathy, apparently just by physically changing the air pressure around them. First hypothesis must be rejected. This gets more perplexing by the hour. RE: re: New Mission – Report 4 Psychological profile completed: Yu-Mans have complex thoughts in usual multi-dimensional, non-linear form. Communication profile: all members of this species (and none others in the biosphere as far as can be determined) have this curious ability to communicate an infinite number of thoughts without telepathy. Suggestion: Yu-Mans somehow map from their thought structures into physical structures directly so that air pressure modulations directly mirror the structure of thought. No, this can’t be correct. Air pressure structures cannot bear such a load of information. Am not thinking clearly. Obviously turning native.
RE: re: New Mission – Report 5 New evidence which is most perplexing: I have established that Yu-Mans can extract patterns from different air structures as hypothesized in previous communications. Some of these patterns clearly relate to thoughts, in a simple symbolic way. For example, a special pattern of sound waves (somewhat abstracted) links the symbol ‘planet-3’ to the right thought and so on. But there is also something we have never seen before. Connecting the symbols in different ways allows Yu-Mans to create complex patterns of symbols that mirror the structure of the relevant thought. It turns out that for some groups of Yu-Mans the order in which the symbols come matters. So even though the pattern ‘the sun orbits planet-3’ has exactly the same symbols as ‘planet-3 orbits the sun’, the fact the parts come in a different order means that it relates to a different thought. Even more peculiar, not all combinations of symbols are possible. For the same group ‘orbits planet-3 the sun’ has no corresponding thought. How on Alpha-Centauri do they manage? RE: re: New Mission – Report 6 Have new inspiration: Yu-Mans have some sort of an internal symbol manipulation device, part of their psychological makeup, just as telepathic abilities are part of our psychology. Perhaps the usual telepathic development mutated in this species. (I hope it wasn’t as a result of the Interstellar Radiation Dump we set up 20,000 years back in nearby Cygnus 3!) My idea is that this internal symbol manipulation device can be used to build complicated structures, which mirror the structure of thought well enough to be used for communication purposes. Bizarre, I know. Need advice. FROM: Director, GI Alpha Centauri TO: CES Jenl Itstre RE: previous report Intriguing: you are suggesting that Yu-Mans can manipulate symbols in their minds to mirror the structure of thoughts and then they turn these same symbols into movements of their breathing and food intake orifices which eventually create puffs of air in the surrounding atmosphere! And you are suggesting further that other Yu-Mans can sense these different air-puffs, turn them back into mental symbols and then use that to work out what the original thought was. Amazing abilities, but I can see how telepathic communication could be mimicked in this way. How do you propose to conceptualise these processes? FROM: CES Jenl Itstre RE: Hypothesis 2 Following Concept Processing Protocols I propose the following: Yu-Mans’ ability to manipulate symbols to approximate the structure of their thoughts will be syntax, and their capacity to turn these symbols into physical instructions for their mouths and lungs will be phonology. FROM: Director, GI Alpha Centauri TO: CES Jenl Istre Make the study of syntax and phonology your prime concern. It is clearly the key to the communication that makes these Yu-Mans so successful in their non-telepathic environment. It’s also perhaps a good route to understanding the structure of Yu-Mans’ thought processes and the ways in which the turn these thoughts into actions. Repeat: make the study of syntax and phonology your prime ...
… ow! As your head hits the table, you wake up. Hmmm, so syntax is about mirroring the structure of thought itself, and phonology involves the amazing ability to glean meanings from how the air moves around you. No wonder they make us study this stuff. David Adger is Reader in Linguistics at Queen Mary College, University of London. He has published on various aspects of the theory of syntax such as how grammar relates to meaning and sound and how the syntax of dialects and idiolects works. He is author of Core Syntax (OUP).
This article first appeared in emagazine 24, April 2004
The language of literature - exploring sentence types John Shuttleworth looks at writers’ uses of sentence types, from early readers to a novel by Toni Morrison and Mark Haddon’s award-winning The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Peter and Jane are at home. They are at play. Look at this, says Peter. We like to jump. We can jump on this. We can have some fun on this. Probably not your idea of a riveting read! But, had you been a primary school pupil in the middle of the twentieth century, this is an extract from the sort of book that might well have formed part of your introduction to reading. It’s from ‘The Ladybird Key Words Reading Scheme’, a set of graded readers that generations of schoolchildren would have been very familiar with. Of course, things have moved on today and your first experience of reading is likely to have been very different from your grandparents’. You can see the problem with such texts as these: their very artificiality means that there’s little or no link between the spoken language that children will have used and heard used, and the written language they are presented with here. For instance, there’s no face-to-face interaction between speakers; nor does the narration sound like real speech! Today’s reading books are very different, thank goodness. One of the reasons that this type of text sounds so odd and artificial to us is that of the six sentences here, five of them are ‘simple’ ones. The other is a sentence containing (very artificial) direct speech ‘Look at this’ together with a reporting clause ‘says Peter’. Linguists identify a ‘simple’ sentence as one that contains only one clause in that there is only one finite verb in it. In this extract these finite verbs are ‘are’, ‘are’, ‘like’, ‘can’ and ‘can’. It’s a very unusual text that contains mainly simple sentences. Another factor that contributes to the dullness of this extract is that five of the six sentences are statements. The exception is the one in which Peter is assumed to be giving a command: ‘Look at this’. Each of the other five sentences conveys, rather flatly, just one piece of information – Peter and Jane are at home, and so on. The structure of the sentences too, is repetitive. Each clause (or simple sentence) contains a subject (‘Peter and Jane’, ‘They’, ‘We’) and each subject monotonously precedes the verb. Can you imagine reading a whole book of fiction that consisted of nothing but one clause statements? It would be more effective than Horlicks or Ovaltine. Of course, some writers can use what they assume will be their readers’ familiarity with the ‘Peter and Jane’ school of writing for their own purposes. For instance, here is the opening of the 1993 Nobel Prize Winner Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye: Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy. See Jane. She has a red dress. She wants to play. You’ll be reassured to know that the whole novel doesn’t continue in this vein. In fact, what Morrison does by using this intertextual reference is to contrast the way of life in the Peter and Jane type book with the reality of life for a poor black family in 1940s Ohio: Our house is old, cold and green. At night a kerosene lamp lights one large room she says later. Most novelists, of course, don’t restrict themselves to a repetitive pattern of sentence forms and functions. It would be just too dull. In fact, readers probably don’t notice the variety of types of sentence that a novelist uses unless there is something very unusual about them that the writer deliberately wants to draw to our attention. However, a recent very successful novel did just that. In Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, the narrator is 15-year-old Christopher Boone. Christopher has Asperger’s Syndrome, a condition with symptoms including
not being able easily to adapt to new situations and being obsessive in behaviour. Christopher is also very literal and precise in his use of language. You will be able to see from this short extract how Mark Haddon skilfully reveals Christopher’s view of the world through the types of sentences that Christopher uses. He is about to travel to London from his home in Swindon to find his mother who has gone to live with her new lover; this is the very first time he has been on his own in a railway station. The tunnel he refers to is the one that passengers use to cross to other platforms. And it was like standing on a cliff in a really strong wind because it made me feel giddy and sick because there were lots of people walking into and out of the tunnel and it was really echoey and there was only one way to go and that was down the tunnel, and it smelled of toilets and cigarettes. So I stood against the wall and held onto the edge of a sign that said Customers seeking access to car park please use assistance phone opposite, right of ticket office to make sure that I didn’t fall over and go into a crouch on the ground. And I wanted to go home. But I was frightened of going home and I tried to make a plan of what I should do in my head but there were too many things to look at and too many things to hear. What seems an everyday experience to us is very frightening to Christopher. Though he rarely uses sentences in the ‘Peter and Jane’ mould, the majority of his sentences are compound ones. Look again at the extract and note how many (not all) of the individual clauses are joined by the coordinating conjunctions ‘and’ and ‘but’. There is an echo of the way that young children write here, but the effect of reading this is not that of the monotonous temporal, linear narrative of children’s writing (then I did this and then … and then …), but that of an immense sympathy for Christopher as he describes literally not only what he can see around him in a strange and frightening environment including even the precise wording of the sign he leans against, but also how he feels (‘it was like standing on a cliff in a really strong wind’). The sentence structures that Haddon foregrounds, but sensibly does not allow to dominate, are one of the keys to our understanding of how Christopher sees the world and a source of our sympathy for him. If you haven’t yet read this novel, then you’ve a treat awaiting.
John Shuttleworth is Principal Examiner for the Editorial Writing Paper (AQA B English Language) and Chief Examiner for AQA B Language and Literature. He co-edits the Living Language series and is the author of Editorial Writing.
This article first appeared in emagazine 25 September 2004
Word classes explained generalizing about words Professor Richard Hudson explains the usefulness of word classes as a way of exploring the general properties of groups of words and learning more about how words behave in different contexts. Talk about grammar, and most people think of nouns and verbs – what used to be called ‘parts of speech’, nowadays called much more straightforwardly ‘word classes’. If you find word classes mysterious, pointless or frightening, this article is for you. Let’s take a simple case: the word ‘round’. What word class does it belong to? As soon as you think of the answer, you start to see the point of word classes because they help to distinguish different uses. For example, look at these sentences: 1 It was a round table. 2 I ate a round of bread. By classifying round as an adjective in (1) and as a noun in (2) we explain the difference between these two uses. Why does ‘round’ stand immediately before a noun (table) in (1)? Because that’s what adjectives do. And why is ‘round’ in (2) separated from the following noun by ‘of’? Because that’s how nouns behave. How do we know? Because that’s how we use countless words that we lump together as ‘adjectives’ and ‘nouns’. In other words, the whole point of a word class is to allow generalisations which we can apply to particular words; and the mark of a really good word class is that it brings together a large number of general properties. For example, by classifying ‘round’ as an adjective in (1), we are explaining not only why it stands before a noun, but also why it could have stood after ‘be’ (The table is round) and why it could have combined with ‘very’ (a very round table) – typical properties of an adjective. This may sound elementary and obvious, but it’s very different from the lay view of word classes, summed up in the so-called definition of an adjective as a ‘describing word’. This misses the point of word classes by trying to pick out one property – ‘describing’ – as the sole relevant property. If this really was the only thing that adjectives had in common, what would be the point of the word class? Some words describe, others don’t; some words begin with B, others don’t. So what? And to make it worse, the one property which is promoted in this way is virtually useless as a genuine criterion for adjective-hood – how on earth do you decide which words are ‘describing’? For a start, what about the verb ‘to describe’? Coming back to our first two examples, ‘round’ is an adjective in (1) not because it is a describing word, but because it is being used according to the general rules for adjectives, whereas in (2) it follows the general rules for nouns. Now look at another use of ‘round’: 3 He looked round the corner. Here we have another word class: ‘preposition’. In (3), round is a very straightforward preposition. How do we know? Because it links a following noun (‘the corner’) to the verb, could have linked it to an earlier noun (as in ‘the house round the corner’), and could have a modifying word such as ‘right’ or ‘just’ before it (right round the corner). Now let’s look at a slightly less straightforward case: 4 He looked round. Is this a preposition or an adverb (compare ‘quickly’ in ‘He looked quickly’)? This is tricky, and the experts won’t necessarily agree. One possible answer is that it is sometimes one, sometimes the other. It’s a preposition if it means ‘round it’, as in
5 He came to the corner and looked round. Round what? Round the corner. If it means the same as ‘round it’, we might as well say it is the same word – a, preposition – but without the pronoun. But look round can mean ‘look behind’, as in (6): 6 I’m going to face the wall till I count to ten, then I’m going to look round. Here, you can’t express the same idea using the preposition ‘round’ (e.g. ‘look round me’ means something different) so you might as well say it’s a different use of ‘round’, belonging to a different word class: adverb. However, you can see that this conclusion lies at the end of a somewhat tenuous chain of assumptions so you could challenge it, and indeed some grammarians would challenge it. Such is the nature of grammar: an area of research like history or chemistry. So what? So next time you’re faced with a word you can’t classify, don’t panic. Think about the word’s grammar, and especially about how it combines with other words; think of other words that behave in the same way; think what to call this class; and rejoice at your growing understanding of grammar. Professor Richard Hudson This article was first published in emagazine 32. 2006
Tense & Aspect – Using Detailed Comments on Verb Forms A verb’s tense tells us when an action takes place, and its aspect tells us about its duration. Beth Kemp explains how commenting on these can gain extra marks. In looking at slogans recently, a class was discussing the effectiveness of the city of Coventry’s slogan: Coventry Inspires. Obviously, in terms of a semantic approach there’s the reference to the city’s magnificent cathedral, but a grammatical analysis of the slogan is also very fruitful. The directness of the dynamic verb ‘inspires’ is much more effective than a stative verb-based alternative such as ‘Coventry is inspiring’. At a more detailed level, the fact that the phrase is in the present tense has power, as it catches Coventry in the act of inspiring and implies that it will continue to do so. Whenever you encounter the phrase, it is happening ‘now’ because of the immediacy of the ongoing present tense. This kind of detailed comment on verbs is often what sets the best candidates apart from others. Students often struggle at first to categorise words into classes, not least because words can have a home in several camps, but if you start to manipulate phrases and think about how else things could have been expressed, it soon becomes clear where the verb is. Thinking in this way also helps you to make these more detailed points about concepts such as tense and aspect, which are often rewarded as ‘detailed’, ‘complex’ or ‘subtle’ grammatical ideas in mark schemes, and therefore bring the highest rewards in terms of marks and grades.
The Technical Stuff It’s important first to distinguish what the terms tense and aspect mean. Simply put, tense is about the time frame in which the action takes place, while aspect tells us something about its duration. Therefore, if we’re talking about tense, we’re using labels such as present and past. Grammatically speaking (i.e. in terms of verb form), there is no future tense in English; we express the future using the auxiliary verbs ‘will’ or ‘shall’ or the phrase ‘be + going to’. Compare that with French or Spanish, where there are inflections to add onto verb stems to indicate the future (for example, je parle [present]; je parlerai [future]). The concept of aspect, on the other hand, has only two categories in English: the perfective (with a sense of completion) and the progressive (with a sense of continuous action). The confusion arises from the fact that the perfective and the simple past form of regular verbs are the same. As you can also see, however, the difference is that the perfective and progressive aspects are considered nonfinite forms. This means that one way of telling the difference is that the aspects are often used with an auxiliary verb. The resulting verb phrase is labelled using a combination of the tense of the auxiliary verb together with the aspect. Tense forms of regular verbs: Present: no ending except -s in 3rd person singular (I walk, you walk, s/he walks, we walk, they walk) Past: -ed ending (walked) Aspect forms of regular verbs: Perfective: -ed ending (walked) Sometimes known as ‘past participle’ Progressive: -ing ending (walking) Sometimes known as ‘present participle’ Forms in use: Present: I walk Present perfect: I have walked Simple past: I walked Present progressive: I am walking
Present perfect progressive: I have been walking Past perfect: I had walked Past progressive: I was walking Past perfect progressive: I had been walking
Using the Knowledge OK, so having established the labels we’re talking about here, let’s look at some ways that this knowledge can be applied in various topics across AS and A2 English Language. Obviously, in any analytical task where you’re expected to ‘apply linguistic methods’ you will be credited if you are able to describe verb tense and aspect use. In most specifications, you will be rewarded even more highly if you are able to comment on the meaning conveyed specifically by that verb form. The following sections give examples of the relevant application of knowledge about tense and aspect.
Language and Power, Representation, Discourses and Debates about Language In the analysis of language use to persuade audiences or to attempt to colour an audience’s attitude to something or someone, the use of tense and aspect can be extremely productive. For example, in Barack Obama’s victory speech, he delivered the powerful line: Change has come to America. The use of the present perfect is used here to indicate that change is here to stay – it has arrived and it will not be moving on. This implies that a breakthrough has already been made, through the use of the perfective aspect, describing an action which is completed. This type of analytical comment is effective, detailed and subtle and allows access to high marks in analytical work. It can also be applied in a range of analytical contexts with all kinds of language. A Daily Mail article from February 2010 uses tense and aspect carefully in the following sentence: Cheryl Cole and her husband Ashley have spent much of the last two weeks living apart, after the singer decided to move into a London hotel. Choosing the progressive ‘living’ encourages the reader to see this as a long – and not yet completed – action. Stating They have lived apart for the last two weeks would be equally factually correct, but the difference lies in the implication that this separation is not over.
Child Language Acquisition It isn’t only in looking at deliberate choices that this detailed view of verbs is helpful, though. The ability accurately to describe tense and aspect is also useful in dealing with Child Language data. For example, it is extremely difficult to make valid linguistic comments about errors such as ‘I did ate it’ without being able to state that the child has doubled the tense marking by applying it to both the auxiliary and the main verb. This clearly shows that the child has noted that adults carry the tense marking to the auxiliary with multi-verb phrases, but the next stage of stripping tense from the main verb is not yet in place. It is also far easier to handle concepts like the acquisition of inflections (for example, Brown’s stages of morphology) if you understand the formation of tense. Students sometimes confuse the possessive -s inflection (for example, mummy’s car) with the third person singular -s used in the present tense (for example, mummy goes). This distinction is important and is impossible to confuse once you have a clear grasp of verbs and how they behave.
Variation, Accent and Dialect, Global English Another area that benefits greatly from a consideration of tense and aspect is the study of linguistic variation, or the analysis of forms that differ from Standard UK English, as shown in the following examples. There are also grammatical differences between the Geordie dialect and Standard English, one of which is the form of the verb ‘to treat’. In SE, the perfective and simple past form of this verb is ‘treated’, whereas on Tyneside, ‘tret’ is the usual form. Standard Indian English uses the present tense differently to the Standard English of England. In England, the present perfect is used with ‘since’ and ‘for’ to show the duration of something which is still happening, for example, ‘I’ve been in this town for two years.’ In Indian English, however, the simple present is used: ‘I am in this town for two years.’ To a British ear, the latter sounds like the two years’ period is beginning now, whereas an Indian English speaker would understand this as a statement describing the state of things up until now.
Language Change In looking at variation across time, or language change, there are various opportunities to demonstrate detailed verb knowledge, in terms of tense formation, use of auxiliaries and orthographic changes. For example, negative clauses such as ‘I knew not’ are typical of Early Modern English word order, positioning the negative at the end, but they also differ from contemporary form in their verb use. A Late Modern English version would use the dummy ‘do’ auxiliary, which would carry the simple past tense, shifting the main verb ‘know’ into the base form and placing the negative between the two verbs: ‘I did not know’. It is also possible that pre-standardisation texts demonstrate orthographical inconsistencies, including the rendition of the -ed inflection on perfective and simple past verbs. You may, for example, find ‘looked’ spelled ‘lookt’, while ‘opened’ is the same as it would be today, and ‘followed’ provided as ‘followd’.
Applied Use of Grammar Clearly not all of the examples shown above will be relevant to you at this point – it all depends on which specification you’re studying, and what stage in the course you are at. You should, however, be able to see more clearly how to use the more detailed grammatical labels in a range of ways. Take the last example: it’s a fairly simple point about spelling irregularity, but showing knowledge of the verb form at the same time really improves the comment’s AO1 marks. (AO1 = Select and apply a range of linguistic methods to communicate relevant knowledge using appropriate terminology and coherent, accurate written expression.) The problem with grammar is that it often doesn’t fit a PEE-type approach: there are few useful, relevant and productive ways to go with the sentence beginning ‘The text uses the past tense because...’. The trick with grammatical detail is to focus really closely on specifics, sometimes dropping technical terms in while you’re also discussing meaning, intention or context and sometimes exploring the specific meaning of the grammatical construction chosen. Beth Kemp is English Language Coordinator at King Edward VI College, Nuneaton. This article first appeared in emagazine 51, February 2011.
