Introduction to English Linguistics

People have many associations with the term grammar and not all of them are necessarily positive. Grammar is often understood as something that one has to painfully acquire in school, while carefully avoiding all sorts of ‘mistakes’. A piece of conventional wisdom states that ‘language exists without the permission of grammarians’ and many people believe that certain uses of language are instances of ‘bad grammar’, that everyday spoken language and youth slang ‘lack grammar’ and that the grammar of their native language is deteriorating.

From a strictly linguistic perspective, all of this is rubbish.

Languages change over time, as do the needs of their speakers, and while a conversation with your friends may be linguistically different from a political speech, a piece of poetry or a newspaper article, it is neither ‘less grammatical’ nor ‘less meaningful’ in the linguistic sense of these terms.

Just like any other aspect of language, linguists approach grammar descriptively - in other word, in the same way that a biologist approaches an organism or a physicist looks at molecules. Grammar is not a checklist of arbitrary dos and don’ts that educators, writers or the editors of the Duden have agreed on, but a set of mental rules that every unimpaired native speaker of a language has perfect command of. Whenever you open your mouth, you combine morphemes and words into highly systematic sequences, and this is what makes what you say comprehensible to others. To the linguist, ‘grammar’ is the invisible system that is at work every time a speaker formulates an utterance - a system without which communication would be impossible.

Word classes

One of the oldest fundamentals of grammatical description (well over 2,000 years old, in fact) is the division of words into groups according to their meaning and function. These groups are called word classes, lexical categories, lexical classes, or, in traditional grammar, parts of speech. The traditional repertoire used to describe Indoeuropean languages like German an English includes eight, sometimes nine word classes:

• verbs
• nouns
• pronouns
• adjectives
• adverbs
• prepositions
• conjunctions
• determiners
• interjections

A basic division frequently made when looking at these categories is between content words and function words (also sometimes described as lexical vs. grammatical word classes). The distinction can be explained by examining the meaning of words such as girl (a noun), run (a verb) and happy (an adjective) vs. but (a conjunction) and the (an article). While girl, run and happy point to something in the world (a kind of person, a kind of activity, a state) but and the do not point to anything - their meaning is purely language-internal (= grammatical). This difference is also noticeable when looking at what new words enter a language. Speakers come up with new nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs quite frequently, but when was the last time you heard that a new article or conjunction had been coined? Although new function words are also introduced into languages, this does not happen as often and usually takes much more time than the introduction of new content words. For this reason, linguists sometimes call content words an open set, whereas function words are considered a closed set.

Verbs

Verbs, along with nouns, form the most basic building blocks of the world’s languages and are generally considered to exist universally, though their form varies from one language to another. Verbs come in two basic varieties, transitive and intransitive, depending on the arguments they require (for more on verb arguments, see the summary for Session 9).

John saw Mary (see needs an object - transitive)

John slept (sleep does not accept an object - intransitive)

Depending on the kind of semantic information they convey, verbs can be classified as stative (which describe states, perceptions or cognitions) or dynamic (which describe processes, actions or activities).

Sue plays tennis (dynamic)

The wildfires destroyed the forest (dynamic)

Mike likes apple pie (stative)

It seems like yesterday that I took this class (stative)

Stative verbs can generally not be marked for progressive aspect (*Mike is liking apple pie, *It is seeming like yesterday).

In English, the main verb is inflected for past tense (typically via the -ed suffix), progressive aspect (via the present participle, formed with the -ing suffix) and perfect aspect (via the past participle). On the third person, verb inflection also marks the combination of singular number and present tense (John likes Mary).

Auxiliary verbs play an important role in English grammar. Be + full verb is used to indicate passive voice (The authorities were notified by Sue) and progressive aspect (Sue is notifying the authorities), while have + full verb is used to indicate perfect aspect (We have lived in this house for over ten years). Another type of auxiliary are the modal verbs can, could, may, might, shall, should, will, would and must which express the speaker’s intent and different degrees of certainty about the future. They are classified as auxiliaries because they can never act as the main verb of a sentence.

Nouns

Often defined as a word that describes ‘a person, place or thing’, nouns are the quintessential content word class. English nouns as a lexical category can be subdivided into proper nouns and common nouns, the former pointing to specific and distinct people, places or institutions (George W. Bush, Copenhagen, Greenpeace, The Queen of England) while the latter describes generic entities (car, boy, word, boredom). Those common nouns that can be grammatically marked for plural via an allomorph of the plural morpheme (such as -s, -en, -Ø) are called count nouns, whereas nouns which cannot be marked in this fashion are known as mass nouns. Mass nouns lack the ability to take a numeral article (compare five cars with *five informations) and are usually quantified with much and less instead of many and fewer. They should not be confused with count nouns that are plural-marked with a zero (Ø) such as five sheep, where sheep is clearly a countable entity.

Pronouns

The name ‘pronoun’ suggests any word that can take the place of noun in a sentence, but the differences between pronoun subtypes are so pronounced that they are sometimes classified as separate word classes. Types of pronouns include:

• personal pronouns
• demonstrative pronouns
• interrogative pronouns
• relative pronouns
• indefinite pronouns

Personal pronouns such as I, you, he, she, it and they are marked for the grammatical category of person (see below), in other words they identify who is speaking (first person), who is being addressed (second person) and who is being spoken about (third person). They are also marked for gender (he - she, him - her), number (I - we, he/she - they) and case (I - me, he/she - him/her, John’s).

Demonstrative pronouns refer to things which are close by (this, these) or far away (that, those), in relative proximal distance to the speaker. This distance must not necessarily be literal, but can also mark the speaker’s perception or attitude.

Interrogative pronouns are used to ask questions such as who, what, why, when and where (and how, which is also considered a ‘wh-word’ in this context).

Relative pronouns such as who, that and which signal relative clauses (see summary for Session 9). Who and which lead dual existences as both interrogative pronouns and relative pronouns:

Who saw him? (interrogative pronoun)

Those who saw him waved (relative pronoun)

Indefinite pronouns stand for unclear or semantically ‘empty’ referents. Examples for indefinite pronouns are anyone, everyone, no one, anybody, nobody, somebody, something and nothing.

Note that pronouns stand by themselves and do not modify nouns. In the utterance Whose is this? whose and this are both pronouns, but in Whose t-shirt is this black one? they are determiners.

Adjectives

Adjectives describe nouns and can occur either attributively or predicatively, depending on whether they come before or after the noun they modify (the tall girl vs. the girl was tall). They may be gradable (big - bigger - biggest) or non-gradable (beautiful - *beautifuller - *beautifullest) and can usually themselves be modified with very or too. Finally, only adjectives can be used in constructions such as It seems ___ or He/she seems ___ .

Adverbs

Adverbs are a very heterogeneous word class and while many of its members can be identified via the suffix -ly (as is loudly, quickly etc) this isn’t always a reliable indicator of adverb-hood. Adverbs can modify verbs, adjectives and other adverbs and frequently indicate when, where, or to what degree something happens.

He quickly opened the door (adverb modifying verb)

John read the unbelievably exciting novel (adverb modifying adjective)

Very soon, we will be out of marshmallows (adverb modifying adverb)

Prepositions

Prepositions typically provide semantic information about the spatial or temporal relation of something to something else. In English, they normally precede the noun they modify, while in other words they follow it (postpositions), which is why the more general name for this word class is adposition. Prepositions are invariant in form (compare with adjectives) and constitute a relatively small category.

Conjunctions

Conjunctions are used to tie together clauses, either by coordination (John went to the movies and Mary came along) or subordination (Mary came along because she wanted to see the movie). Coordinating conjunctions tie together elements that are categorically similar (bread and butter, left or right, tired but happy) while subordinating conjunctions express conditions (If you do well on the test, let me know how you prepared for it), cause and effect (We didn’t see the show since we didn’t go to Boston) or temporal contrast (He took off his shoes before he entered the apartment).

Determiners

Determiners precede nouns and in English they provide restrictive information about possession and definiteness. Like pronouns, they can be divided into subclasses:

• definite and indefinite articles (the, a, an)
• demonstratives (this, that, these, those)
• possessives (my, our, your, her, his, its their)
• interrogatives (which, what, whose)

Interjections

Interjections are expressions such as hey, wow, ouch, umm, yeah and hmm which are a vital part of every-day spoken language, but have no strictly semantic content. They are often excluded from grammatical classification because they primarily serve an emotive function and are in no immediate relation to the surrounding elements. One reason why they are often overlooked is their fairly low frequency in traditional written language, though they are popular in instant messaging and SMS.

Grammatical categories

The term grammatical category broadly refers to a set of syntactic features that is conceptually similar and applies systematically to a linguistic expression. More concretely, grammatical categories that are salient in English are

• tense
• aspect
• person
• number
• gender
• case
• voice
• mood/modality

Tense

Tense allows speakers to express information about temporal relations, typically by marking the verb. In strictly morphosyntactic terms, English has only two tenses: present and past tense. Futurity is expressed in English analytically via will or going to auxiliaries. Note that what is generally considered the English tense system in school books is more precisely the combination of present, past and future tense with simple, progressive, perfect and perfect-progressive aspect.

Tense	Simple Aspect	Progressive Aspect	Perfect Aspect	Perfect Progressive Aspect
Present	take/s	am/is/are taking	have/has taken	have/has been taking
Past	took	was/were taking	had taken	had been taking
Future	will/shall take	will be taking	will have taken	will have been taking

Aspect

In English, the category of aspect allows speakers to mark actions expressed by verbs as completed, ongoing, recurrent or habitual. Note that aspect concerns the action expressed by the verb as a process and not its temporal location in the past, present or future. While many school grammars treat the present perfect as a sort of past tense, an utterance such as I have eaten strictly only implies that this action has occurred and that it was completed, not when it took place. Temporal relations are expressed by tense, leaving aspect to add information about the status of something as ongoing or completed.

Person

The participant role of an individual in discourse is signaled via grammatical person, in English specifically via the personal pronouns of the first, second and third person (see also pronouns - personal pronouns). English lacks certain marked distinctions in the pronominal system made by many other languages, for example the distinction between a formal and a more familiar second person (vous - tu, Sie - Du) and between singular and plural on the second person.

		Singular				Plural
		Subjective	Objective	Possessive	Reflexive	Subjective	Objective	Possessive	Reflexive
First		I	me	mine	myself	we	us	ours	ourselves
Second		you	you	yours	yourself	you	you	yours	yourselves
Third	Masculine	he	him	his	himself	they	them	theirs	themselves
	Feminine	she	her	hers	herself
	Neuter	it	it	its	itself

Note that the paradigm reproduced above represents standard Modern English - the pronominal system shows considerable dialectal variation.

Number

The grammatical category of number describes count information (one, more than one, in some languages additional cases) that is encoded via inflection. In English, nouns, pronouns and verbs can indicate number. Due to its mixed vocabulary, English nouns of Latin and Greek origin form irregular plurals (alumnus - alumni), while some nouns are marked with a zero (deer - deer, sheep - sheep) or via umlaut (foot - feet, woman - women).

Gender

Grammatical gender is a form of noun classification that is common in many Indoeuropean languages. Some languages encode two genders (French), others three (German, Latin), but in other language families even wider systems of classification exist (for example, see the four-way distinction made in Dyirbal, spoken in Australia). Gender marking, which was relatively similar to German during the Old English period, has been lost to a large extent in Modern English. Exceptions are: personal pronouns (he - she - it), possessive determiners (her car, his shirt), relative pronouns (who/whom - which) and gendered nouns (prince - princess, heir - heiress, actor - actress). In those relatively few cases where English retains gender marking, grammatical and biological gender coincide relatively closely, whereas in languages with full grammatical gender the choice is often more idiosyncratic (e.g. German: der Junge - das Mädchen).

Voice

Voice is a category that describes the relationship of verb arguments to one another. English distinguishes between active and passive voice and uses a periphrastic construction (be + past participle) to realize the passive. In a passive construction, the direct object becomes the subject of the verb while the former subject is either omitted or moved into an adverbial:

John likes pie (active voice)

Pie is liked by John (passive voice)

Mood/Modality

Grammatical mood describes certainty, world-knowledge and the intent of speakers regarding what they express. In English, mood and modality, which is the expression of inference (epistemic modality) or conviction that something should be done (deontic modality), are largely identical, but other languages encode other semantic information through this category.

Sally is a teacher (indicative)

Sally must be a teacher (potential)

Semantically, the example illustrates the inference encoded in the second sentence: the speaker is assuming that Sally is a teacher. As with other categories, the stricter definition of mood assumes morphosyntactic encoding, as it exists in the German subjunctive:

Er ist müde (indicative)

Es sagt, dass er müde sei (subjunctive)

However, there is a strong tendency in German to avoid this kind of usage and it is rare in spoken language:

Er sagt, dass er müde ist (’implied’ subjunctive)

Key terms

• descriptive vs. prescriptive grammar
• content words - function words, open set - closed set
• word classes
  • verbs
    • transitive - intrasitive
    • dynamic - stative
    • full - auxiliary
  • nouns
    • proper - common
    • count - mass
  • pronouns
    • personal
    • demonstrative
    • interrogative
    • relative
    • indefinite
  • adjectives
    • attributive - predicative
    • gradable - non-gradable
  • adverbs
  • prepositions
  • conjunctions
    • coordinating - subordinating
  • determiners
    • definite and indefinite articles
    • demonstratives
    • possessives
    • interrogatives
  • interjections
• grammatical categories
  • tense
  • aspect
  • person
  • number
  • gender
  • case
  • voice
  • mood/modality