Basic English Grammar with Exercises

Chapter 2 - Grammatical Foundations: Structure

Although the system of rules in (36) is capable of describing the structures of a
good number of English sentences, it is clear that we would need many more rules to
attempt to describe the structures of all English sentences. For example, not every DP
is made up of a determiner followed by a noun. Some may contain just a determiner,
such as this for example, or a determiner, an adjective and a noun, such as a rusty
kettle. A DP may indeed contain, amongst other things another sentence, such as the
diagnosis that she had flu. It is clear that we would need many rewrite rules to capture
all the possibilities for English DPs.
This fact does not invalidate this kind of rule for linguistic descriptive purposes. As
long as there is only a finite number of rules, a legitimate grammar could be
formulated even with a very large number of them. However, if human grammars are
constructed of a large number of rules the question is raised of how children could ever
learn their grammatical systems. This consideration has lead some linguists to assume
that what is needed is a far more restricted set of rules. We will introduce the theory of
phrase structure that follows this line of thought in the next chapter.

2 Grammatical Functions

2.1 The subject

In all the sentences we have looked at so far, there has been an argument of the verb
which appears to its left. All of the other arguments have appeared after the verb. As
we see by the following sentences, this is an essential fact about grammatical English
sentences:

(37) a Garry gave Victor a radio
b gave Garry Victor a radio
c Victor Gary gave a radio
d *a radio Victor Gary gave

While there is a special way to pronounce these words in the order in (37c) that would
make it grammatical (with a pause after Victor), this would have a special
interpretation in which Victor is singled out from a set of possible referents and the rest
of the sentence is taken to be something said particularly about him. However, without
this special intonation and meaning the sentence is just as ungrammatical as the others:
the ‘normal’ word order of English is as in (37a). Thus the basic word order of English
has one and only one argument of the verb to its left and all the others to its right.
From a structural point of view, the argument that precedes the verb also differs
from the other arguments. This argument is an immediate constituent of the sentence,
whereas all other arguments are inside the verb phrase:

(38) S

DP VP

Gary gave DP DP

Victor a radio

Note:

A triangle is used in a tree

diagram when we do not want

to represent the details of the

internal structure of the phrase.