English grammar a university course angela downing

x  ENGLISH GRAMMAR 5.8 Anti-causative structure 5.9 Analytical causatives with a resulting attribute 5.10 Summary of examples of transitivity structures in material processes  5.11 Examples of mental processes 5.12 Examples of cognitive processes 5.13 Carrier with its Attribute 5.14 Current Attribute and resulting Attribute 5.15 The be/belong possessive structure 5.16 Verbs of possession in the Possessor/Possessed structure 5.17 Verbal processes 5.18 Place and time 5.19 Basic realisations of semantic roles 5.20 Nominalised realisations of semantic roles 5.21 Two cognitive mappings of a situation 5.22 High and low transitivity 5.23 Main types of processes, participants and circumstances 6.1 Theme and Rheme 6.2 Multiple Themes 6.3 Themes derived from a Hypertheme 7.1 Direct and indirect speech 8.1 Constituent elements of the English verbal group 8.2 Be, have and do 8.3 Verbs + particles (phrasal verbs) 9.1 Speech time as reference time 9.2 The scope of the simple Present tense 9.3 The Present Perfect and the Past tense 9.4 Adjuncts of indefinite time and adjuncts of definite time 9.5 Lexical aspect of English verbs 10.1 Pre-head, head and post-head in nominal groups 10.2 Basic structure of the nominal group 10.3 Definite and indefinite reference 10.4 Summary of determinative features 10.5 Descriptors and classifiers and their ordering 10.6 Defining and supplementive adverbs 11.1 Structure of the adjectival group 11.2 Grading options in English for comparative and superlative adjectives 11.3 Interrelated uses of certain time adverbs 12.1 Structure of the prepositional phrase 12.2 Prepositions and adverbs 165 166 170 172 175 177 177 179 179 183 186 191 191 192 195 196 217 218 229 275 288 289 307 318 319 327 329 336 362 363 375 390 399 408 422 430 453 468 478 PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION In consonance with the welcome suggestions made by Routledge and reviewers alike, this book has been revised again for its third edition with certain aims in mind. The first, in this age of cuts, was to slim down the content as regards the length of the text, without losing the character and coherence of the whole. This I have proceeded to do, reducing the length of each chapter as well as that of other sections. Offsetting this pruning, there was the need to cover or amplify certain areas of the grammar that had been underdeveloped in previous editions, despite their importance. Such is the case with conditional sentences. They are complex enough for non-native students to be wary of using them, yet at the same time common enough in interpersonal interaction, both spoken and written, to warrant careful attention and practice. They also have interesting variants which students may be unaware of. The gap is now filled in Chapter 7. A further aim has been to increase the projection of the grammar to an American readership. Differences of grammar between Standard American and Standard British English, which already appear in the second edition, are now more numerous and explicit; wherever possible, they are accompanied by authentic illustrations. It is wellknown that the major differences between these two standard forms of English lie in the lexis rather than in the grammar, and that features of American grammar are soon taken up and adopted, especially by young British speakers. New illustrations, both one-liners and short texts, have been selected so as to provide, at the same time, American lexical items that differ from their British English counterparts. Comparisons of American with British English as regards grammar in use are made where the grammatical point in question is being discussed, and are signalled as AmE vs BrE. A further detail is that the term Module is now replaced by Unit, as being more transparent to American readers. I feel confident that Philip Locke, were he still alive, would welcome these further changes, together with those already carried out in the second edition of 2006. Without his invaluable collaboration in the writing of the first edition, published in 1992, it is likely that the whole conception of English Grammar, A University Course might have been different. I am particularly indebted to him for his enormous enthusiasm combined with unflappability, which made our joint collaboration so enjoyable. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My debt to my predecessors is, as before, very great. In addition to the grammars of Michael Halliday, Randolph Quirk, Sydney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik, the wealth of information, corpus examples and frequencies provided by the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, by Douglas Biber and his colleagues Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad and Edward Finegan, have been a reliable resource of great value. Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum’s A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar, based on their previous Cambridge Grammar of Contemporary English, though not specifically a functional grammar, is both informative and a pleasure to read. Aimed at students who will shortly be seeking employment, these texts argue for the advantages of having a knowledge of grammar, an ability to express thoughts clearly and the capacity to analyse a sentence or paragraph for the meanings they will or will not support, all of which I wholly endorse. I also thank C.W.K. Gleerup, Lund, for A Corpus of English Conversation edited by Jan Svartvik and Randolph Quirk. Specialised grammars such as those of Geoff Thompson, Thomas and Meriel Bloor, Lachlan Mackenzie and Elena Martínez Caro among others have their place on my bookshelves. Specialised monographs and articles have had to be kept to a minimum in the Select Bibliography. I am grateful for access to BYU-BNC (based on the British National Corpus from Oxford University Press) (Davies (2004–) and for the use of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) (Davies (2008–). I am indebted to the many friends, colleagues and consultants who have made helpful comments on the previous editions. Among the consultants I was pleased to receive the reports and suggestions made by Joyce Stavick, of the University of North Georgia, by Pentii Haddington, of the University of Oulu, Finland and by the anonymous reviewer who provided perceptive comments and questions. I have implemented as many of their suggestions as has been possible in the time allowed. Also much appreciated were the many useful comments made by Mike Hannay (Free University, Amsterdam), Andrei Stoevsky (University of Sofia), Chris Butler (University of Wales, Swansea), Hilde Hasselgård (University of Oslo) and Bruce Taylor (University of Boston). I owe thanks to Geoff Thompson (University of Liverpool) for allowing me to use the best real-life spontaneous utterance of multiple left-detachment, and more recently, some of his striking examples of adjective-headed generic nouns. Thanks also to Thomas Givón and White Cloud Publishing for allowing me to insert an extract from his novel Downfall of a Jesuit. I remember with affection Emilio Lorenzo of the Real Academia Española, and his words of encouragement when the first edition was at an embryonic stage. I would especially like to express my thanks to Chris Butler and to Jorge Arús (Universidad Complutense) for their unfailing willingness to come to my ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS  xiii rescue in technological matters; to Paloma Tejada, also of the Complutense for reading through the whole second edition and providing me with abundant comments; to Laura Alba (UNED) for first-hand confirmation of unusual items of American English, Carmen Santamaría (Universidad de Alcalá) for drawing my attention to certain details and Laura Hidalgo (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) for reading through many sections of the new edition in preparation; my boundless gratitude go to both Enrique and Eduardo Hidalgo for their help with the diagrams. My thanks go also to Louisa Semlyen for offering me the opportunity of a third edition, and to Sophie Jaques and Rosemary Baron of Routledge for their patience and help. Thanks also to copy editor Jane Olorenshaw and to Tamsin Ballard, Julie Willis and the production team at Swales and Willis Ltd. on behalf of Taylor and Francis for efficient work prior to and during production. Finally, I thank my long-suffering family for their constant support and encouragement. INTRODUCTION TO THE THIRD EDITION AIMS OF THE COURSE This book has been written primarily for undergraduate and graduate students of English as a foreign or second language. It is also addressed to teachers and lecturers, whether native or non-native speakers of English, and to others interested in applying a broadly functional approach to language teaching in higher education. It assumes an intermediate standard of knowledge and practical handling of the language and, from this point of departure, seeks to fulfil the following aims: 1 to further students’ knowledge of English through exploration and analysis; 2 to help students acquire an integrated vision of English, rather than concentrate on unrelated areas; 3 to see a grammar as providing a means of understanding the relation of form to meaning, and meaning to use, in context; 4 to provide a basic terminology which, within this framework, will enable students to make these relationships explicit; 5 to stimulate the learners’ capacity to interact with others in English and to express themselves appropriately in everyday registers, both spoken and written. While not pretending to be exhaustive, its wide coverage and functional approach have been found appropriate not only in first degree courses but also in postgraduate programmes and as a background resource for courses, publications and work on translation, stylistics, reading projects and discourse studies. A FUNCTIONAL APPROACH TO GRAMMAR A functional grammar is functional in various ways. In the first place, it does not consist of a set of rules governing all forms of grammatical structures and their relation to one another, with a concern that they are ‘well-formed’. Rather, a functional approach is geared towards meaning and aims to show how meanings are expressed in different forms according to speakers’ and writers’ communicative goals. This view is based, following Michael Halliday, on the assumption that all languages fulfil two higher-level functions (metafunctions) in our lives. One is to express our interpretation of the world as we experience it (sometimes called the ‘ideational’ or the ‘representational’ function); the other is to interact with others in order to bring about changes in the environment (the ‘interpersonal’ function). How we put together or ‘organise’ what we say or INTRODUCTION TO THE THIRD EDITION  xv write in such a way that the ‘message’ is coherent and relevant to the situation represents a third (the ‘textual’ meta-function), and this, too, is given its place in a functional grammar. Second, the regular patterns of different kinds that can be distinguished in language reflect the uses which a language serves. For instance, the clause types known as ‘declarative’, ‘interrogative’ and ‘imperative’ serve the purposes of expressing a multitude of types of social behaviour, such as making statements, asking questions and giving orders. In this area the pragmatic concepts of speech acts, politeness, relevance and inference are brought in to explain how speakers use and interpret linguistic forms and sequences in English within cultural settings. In describing the more detailed mechanisms of English, the notion of ‘function’ is used to describe syntactic categories such as Subjects and Objects, semantic roles such as Agent and informational categories such as Theme and Rheme, Given and New. We shall see, for instance that in English the Agent, that is, the semantic role indicating the one who instigates or carries out an action, typically conflates with the Subject: ‘Tom’ in Tom spent all the money; furthermore, the grammatical Subject in a clause tends to occur initially in English, thus occupying the same position as Theme as well as Agent. Subject, Agent, Theme is not a rigid choice, however: the elements can be moved around, as shown in 1.3.2. A functional approach also will point out the formal differences, but the principal aim will be to explain how different variations of form affect meanings, and how speakers and writers use meanings and forms to interact in social settings. Third, this type of grammar is functional in that each linguistic element is seen not in isolation but in relation to others, since it has potential to realise different functions. Structural patterns are seen as functional patterns of constituents, whether of participants and processes, of modifiers and head of, for instance, a noun, or of Subject, verb and Complements, among others. These in turn are realised in a variety of ways according to the communicative effect desired. Speakers and writers are free, within the resources a particular language displays, to choose those patterns which best carry out their communicative purposes at every stage of their interaction with other speakers and readers. With these considerations in mind, the present book has been designed to place meaning firmly within the grammar and, by stressing the meaningful functions of grammatical forms and structures, to offer a description of the grammatical phenomena of English in use, both in speech and writing. This book, we hope, may serve as a foundation for further study in specific areas or as a resource for the designing of other materials for specific purposes. PRESENTATION OF CONTENT The grammatical content of the course is presented in three blocks: •• •• a first chapter giving a bird’s-eye view of the whole course and defining the basic concepts and terms used in it; seven chapters describing clausal and sentence patterns, together with their corresponding elements of structure, from syntactic, semantic, textual and communicative-pragmatic points of view; and