(^12) Chapter 2 A rapid overview
grammatical description going back to the late sixteenth century. By the eighteenth
century this traditional line of work on grammar was quite well developed and
began to harden into a body of dogma that then changed very little in the nine
teenth and twentieth centuries. Yet many aspects ofthis widely accepted system are
clearly mistaken. We do not want to simply present once again what so many ear
lier books have uncritically repeated. There are many revisions to the description
of English that we think greatly enhance the coherence and accuracy of the
description, many of them stemming from research in linguistics since the middle
of the twentieth century, and we will offer brief comparative comments on some of
them.
1 Two kinds of sentence
The syntactically most straightforward sentences have the form of a sin
gle clause or else of a sequence of two or more coordinated clauses, joined by a
coordinator (e.g., and, or, but). We illustrate in [1]:
[I] CLAUSAL SENTENCES (having the form of a clause) I
a. Kim is an actor.
b. Pa t is a teacher.
c. Sam is an architect.
ii COMPOUND SENTENCES (having the form of a coordination of clauses)
a. Kim is an actor; but Pat is a teacher.
b. Kim is an actor; Pa t is a teacher; and Sam is an architect.
The distinction between the two kinds of sentence is drawn in terms of clauses
(one versus more than one), which means we're taking the idea of a clause to be
descriptively more basic than the idea of a sentence. Example sentences cited in the
rest of this chapter and in the following eleven chapters will almost invariably have
the form of a clause; we return to sentences having the form of a coordination of
clauses when we discuss coordination more generally, in Ch. 14.
2 Clause, word and phrase
The most basic kind of clause consists of a subject followed by a pred
icate. In the simplest case, the subject (Subj) is a noun and the predicate (Pred) is a
verb:
[^2 ] Subj
Things
Pred Subj Pred Subj
change. I
LI
K
im
-,--
I
efi
t'
--l
1 I People
Pred
complained. I
I In traditional grammar the examples in [i] are called 'simple sentences', but we don't use this term; it
covers only a subset of what we call clausal sentences.
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