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From thoughtco.com
Updated April 09, 2017
"The grammatical rules of the English language,"
says Joseph Mukalel,"are determined by the nature of the language itself,
but the rules of use and the appropriateness of the use are determined by the speech community" (Approaches To
English Language Teaching, 1998).
Examples and Observations
- "Grammar is
concerned with how sentences and utterances are formed. In a
typical English sentence, we can see the two most basic principles of
grammar, the arrangement of items (syntax) and the structure of items (morphology):
I gave my sister a sweater for her
birthday.
The meaning of this sentence is obviously
created by words such as gave, sister, sweater and birthday.
But there are other words (I, my, a, for, her) which contribute to the
meaning, and, additionally, aspects of individual words and the way they are
arranged which enable us to interpret what the sentence means."
(Ronald Carter and Michael McCarthy, Cambridge Grammar of English: A
Comprehensive Guide. Cambridge University Press, 2006)
- Basic
Word Structure in English
"[W]ords are made up of elements of two kinds: bases and affixes. For the most part, bases can
stand alone as whole words whereas affixes can't. Here are some examples,
with the units separated by a [hyphen], bases [in italics], and affixes
[in bold italics]:
en-danger
slow-ly
un-just
work-ing
black-bird-s
un-gentle-man-ly
The bases danger, slow, and
just, for example, can form whole words. But the affixes can't: there are
no words *en, *ly, *un. Every word contains at least one
or more bases; and a word may or may not contain affixes in addition.
"Affixes are subdivided into prefixes, which precede the base to which they attach,
and suffixes, which follow."
(Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, A Student's Introduction to English
Grammar. Cambridge University Press, 2006)
- Word
Order and Inflection in English
- "English grammar is unlike other grammars in that it is
structured on word order while many languages are
based on inflection. Thus, syntactic structure
in English may be quite different from those in other languages."
(Linda Miller Cleary, Linguistics for Teachers. McGraw-Hill,
1993)
- "One of the major syntactic changes in
the English language since Anglo-Saxon times has been the disappearance
of the S[ubject]-O[bject]-V[erb] and V[erb]-S[ubject]-O[bject] types
of word-order, and the establishment of
the S[ubject]-V[erb]-O[bject] type as
normal. The S-O-V type disappeared in the early Middle Ages, and the V-S-O
type was rare after the middle of the seventeenth century. V-S word-order
does indeed still exist in English as a less common variant, as in 'Down
the road came a whole crowd of children,' but the full V-S-O type hardly
occurs today."
(Charles Barber, The English Language: A Historical Introduction,
rev. ed. Cambridge University Press, 2000)
- Rules
of English Syntax
- "Syntax is the set of rules for combining words into
sentences. For example, the rules of English syntax tell us that, because nouns generally precede verbs in basic English sentences, dogs
and barked may be combined as Dogs barked but not *Barked
dogs (the asterisk being used by linguists to mark constructions that
violate the rules of the language.) . . . Still other syntactic
rules require the presence of an additional word if dog is singular: one can say A dog barks
or The dog barks but not *Dog bark(s). Moreover, the rules
of standard English syntax tell us that -ing
must be attached to bark if some form of be precedes bark:
Dogs are barking or The/A dog is barking, but not *Dogs
barking. Yet another rule of English syntax tells us that the word to
must be present in a sentence such as I allowed him to sing a song,
yet to must not be present if the verb is changed to hear
(I heard him sing a song but not *I heard him to sing a song).
With still other verbs, the speaker has the option of using or omitting to,
for example, I helped him (to) sing a song. Morphemes such as the, a, -ing,
and to are often termed function morphemes to distinguish them
from content morphemes such as dog,
bark, sing, song, and the like."
(Ronald R. Butters, "Grammatical Structure." The Cambridge
History of the English Language, Volume 6, ed. by John Algeo. Cambridge
University Press, 2001)
- "[One] feature of English syntax is transformation—moving phrases around within a sentence
structure governed by certain syntactic rules. . . . After the transformation,
the new meaning for two out of three sentences is different from their
original sentences. The transformed sentences, however, are still
grammatically correct, because the transformation has followed the
syntactic rules. If transformation is not done by a rule, the new sentence
will not be understood. For example, if the word not is put between
the words good and student, as in He is a good not
student, the meaning will be confusing and ambiguous: Is he not a
good student? or Is he not a student?"
(Shelley Hong Xu, Teaching English Language Learners. Guilford
Press, 2010)
- Gender
in English
"We think it's a nuisance that so many European languages assign gender to nouns for no reason, with French
having female moons and male boats and such. But actually, it's we who are
odd: Almost all European languages belong to one family—Indo-European—and of all of them,
English is the only one that doesn't assign genders. . . .
"Old English had the crazy genders we would expect of a good European
language—but the Scandinavians didn't bother with those, and so now we
have none."
(John McWhorter, "English Is Weird." The Week,
December 20, 2015)
Adjectives in English
"The most frequently used adjectives in English are monosyllabic, or disyllabic [two-syllable]
words of native origin. They tend to be paired as opposites such as good-bad,
big-little, large-small, tall-short, black-white, easy-hard, soft-hard,
dark-light, alive-dead, hot-cold, which have no distinctive form to mark
them as adjectives.
"Many adjectives, such as sandy, milky, are derived from nouns, other adjectives or
verbs by the addition of certain characteristic suffixes. Some of these are of native origin, as in greenish,
hopeful, handsome, handy, foremost, useless,
while others are formed on Greek or Latin bases, as in central, secondary,
apparent, civic, creative, and yet others via French
such as marvelous and readable."
(Angela Downing, English Grammar: A University Course, 3rd ed.
Routledge, 2015)
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