Delahunty and Garvey
where nothing resonated, where the past could not pretend to shape
itself into the present, where planes had clear sharp edges to which
nothing clung. People didn’t come into it; they weren’t part of the
equation. What relationships she’d had had been brief and in her con-
trol, though her partners didn’t seem aware of this. It was astonishing
that people could be so easily hoodwinked, so easily led.concluding remarks.
In this chapter, we explored the major grammatical structures that enable
English speakers to create sentences of infinite length and complexity. De-
spite the intricacy and variety they make possible, finite and non-finite sub-
ordinate clauses are individually fairly simple. Each has a rather limited set
of formal properties, and we have had to add very few functions to describe
their workings. But the process of embedding—of building structures with-
in structures—multiplies the potential for variety exponentially. We have
only scratched the surface of that potential. If you want to see some dra-
matic demonstrations, pick up a sonnet by Shakespeare, a poem by Dylan
Thomas, or a piece of prose by Henry James, William Faulkner, or Virginia
Woolf. Or pick up an essay that you yourself have written recently. You will
probably amaze yourself with the complexity of your own language.
references and resources
Berk, Lynn M. 1999. English Syntax: From Word to Discourse. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Biber, Douglas, Susan Conrad, and Geoffrey Leech. 2002. Longman Student
Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow, UK: Longman.
Carter, Ronald and Michael McCarthy. 2006. Cambridge Grammar of English.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Grimes, Martha. 1998. The Stargazy. New York: Onyx.
Huddleston, Rodney and Geoffrey K. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar
of the English Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
_____ 2005. Student’s Introduction to English Grammar. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Prince, Ellen. 1978. A comparison of wh-clefts and it-clefts. Language 54. 4:
883-906.
glossary.
absolute construction: subordinate expression with no explicit grammat-
ical link to the clause it depends on.