Chapter 2 Grammatical Foundations: Structure
1 Structure
1.1 The building blocks of sentences
So far we have been discussing the properties of words and have said hardly anything
about larger units of language such as sentences. A sentence is obviously made up of a
number of words, but as we pointed out in the previous chapter, it is not true that
sentences are formed simply by putting a row of words together. If this were so then
we might expect positions in a sentence to be identifiable numerically, but this is not
so:
(1) a Sid saw Wendy
b yesterday Sid saw Wendy
In (a) we have the verb in the second position, with one of its arguments (the
experiencer) to the left, in first position, and another of its arguments to the right in the
third position. In (b) however, everything moves one step to the right to accommodate
the word yesterday which now occupies first position. The point we made previously
is that the ordinal placement of a word in a sentence is unimportant as it is clear that
the words Sid, saw and Wendy are in the same grammatical positions in both
sentences, even though they are in different ordinal positions in the string of words.
This then raises the question of how grammatical positions are defined, if not
linearly. To answer this question we must first acknowledge the existence of units in a
sentence which are bigger than words. Let us start with an observation that we have
already noted, without much discussion, that a sentence might contain another
sentence. Consider the following sentences:
(2) a Geoff jeopardised the expedition
b Kate claimed [Geoff jeopardised the expedition]
It is fairly clear that the bracketed part of the sentence in (2b) is the exact same
sentence as stands alone in (2a) and that the elements that they contain are in the same
positions in both cases. It therefore follows that (2b) is not simply a string of words,
but has a structure whereby it is made up of things which themselves are made up of
other things. We can represent this situation in the following way: