"II. Elements of Grammar"

Randolph Quirk & Sidney Greenbaum

[notes by Pat Conner]

These notes cover pages 10-25 of Quirk & Greenbaum's A Concise Grammar of Contemporary English (Philadelphia: HBJ, 1973).

General note: You must understand how a chapter is organized in order to understand what's going on in it. Look at the typeface of the section title just above paragraph 2.2 in your book: Parts of a sentence, and compare that to the typeface of paragraph 2.2, Subject and Predicate. The former is a main division; the latter is a sub-division. Always make sure you understand how these parts work, or you may be seriously misled.

FIVE ELEMENTS OF GRAMMAR

• PARTS OF A SENTENCE
• PARTS OF SPEECH
• STATIVE AND DYNAMIC
• PRO-FORMS
• QUESTION AND NEGATION

You should note first of all that we're primarily concerned here with the grammar of the structure we call a sentence. Most scholars of language agree that the sentence is the basic unit of human languages, although we sometimes argue about just what constitutes a sentence. There are rules for the way we choose and combine the sounds in our language (the study of this is called phonology); there rules for the way groups of sounds combine to make up meaningful units in words (we call this morphology); there are rules for how all of these must be mapped out into a sentence. (This we call syntax.) The five sections we're given to represent the elements of grammar in fact represent what might be called syntactic domains. Each of these is addressed under each element

• PARTS OF A SENTENCE
• This is the domain of the functional parts of a sentence: subject, predicate, complement, object, etc. If we were building a house, the parts of the sentence would be the walls, the doorways, the windows, the roof, and other integral parts.
• subject and predicate
• operator, auxiliary, and predication
• range of operators
• an "operator" is that part of the verb phrase which is handled in different ways, depending on whether you're asking a questions, making a statement, etc. If you have to supply one, you use "do."
• sentence elements
• subject
• verb
• complement
• object
• adverbial
• complements and objects
• objects fill out verbs. Ordinarily, you can't merely "hit"; you have to hit something. That something is the object. Complements, on the other hand, fill out (or complete) nouns.
• categories of verb
• Intensive verbs (wherein the verb of the sentence links subject to the subject complement)
• Extensive verbs
• Intransitive (if the verb cannot support object nor complement
• Transitive
• simple transitive (take a direct object)
• ditransitive (take both direct and indirect object)
• complex transitive (take object complement)
• categories of adverbial
• adverb of time (= when)
• adverb of place (= where)
• adverb of process (= how)
• types of sentence structure
• [be sure to understand the diagram on 2.10 ]
• element realization types
• There are "slots" in a sentence structure, and they can be realized (= filled) by a number of possibilities, often ranging from single words to very long clauses.
• PARTS OF SPEECH
• The parts of speech are the minimal building blocks of the parts of the sentence. Subjects, predicates, complements, objects, all make use of these building blocks in prescribed ways. If we were building a house, the parts of speech would be bricks, two-by-fours, tar paper, 4 x 8 sheets of plywood, and other bits which can be fashioned into wall and doors and steps.
• A list parts of speech
• Open class items
• noun
• adjective
• adverb
• verb
• Closed system items
• article
• demonstrative
• pronoun
• preposition
• conjunction
• interjection (really a closed system?)
• STATIVE AND DYNAMIC
• This is the first domain of transformation in which we see a sentence shifting the way items are regarded. On the edge of a soccer field in Cambridge, England, there is a little square building which used to be a public toilets; now it is a bicycle shop. Just as buildings can shift greatly the context in which we consider them, so sentences can do the same things by moving between the stative and dynamic.
• PRO-FORMS
• This is the domain of substitution and compression. Once a speaker has acquainted the hearer with a clear concept, that concept can be signaled through the use of a small number of words. I cannot think of a good analogy to this in the non-linguistic world, but it may be like a computer program which "compresses" a file to make it smaller in such a way that another computer can guess what has been removed from what is present and thus reconstitute the program. It is part of the power of language that we have to stretch so far for an analogy.
• QUESTION AND NEGATION
• This is the domain known as displacement or the ability to consider subjects which are not present and which may not exist or to deny what someone else has asserted.
• Wh-questions
• Yes-no questions
• negation and non-assertion (be sure to understand the chart at 2.20.