Week 2 - Sentences

Interview with David Crystal

I’m talking with the world-renowned linguist, Professor David Crystal at the Randolph Hotel in Oxford, just before his sold-out session at this year’s Oxford Literary Festival.

There’s been a reaction to a period when there was no grammar being done at all. Remember, grammar was taught pretty routinely in schools from the eighteenth century until the 1960s, really. I was part of the last generation to have formal grammar in school, and it suddenly went out. So that a generation later there were kids coming through university, for instance, who had never done any grammar at all. I remember the first generation, I was giving a lecture about grammar, I used the word preposition, and the class suddenly started to buzz with curiosity, I said ‘what’s the problem’, and somebody put their hand up and said ‘please, what’s a preposition?’, and I said ‘how many of you don’t know what a preposition is?’, and three quarters of the class put their hands up. A little girl over in the corner put her hand up and said ‘I think I know’, I said ‘what is it?’, and she said ‘is it something to do with getting on a horse?’, she said. I said ‘what?’ She said ‘because, I was always taught there was a pre-position, you see’, and I thought ‘good heavens, how can grammar have gone out like this?’ And for two generations, there were people going through schools, and many of them became teachers, who had no grammar training whatsoever. Fast-forward now to the 1990s in Britain, when the national curriculum comes in, when there was an awareness that this kind of language awareness had disappeared completely - it wasn’t just grammar, you see, it was metrics in poetry and all sorts of other formal parts of grammar study - and the national curriculum says ‘we must get language awareness back’, but that was the early ’90s; it takes about ten years for that kind of awareness to come to the surface in the form of materials, and so in the early 2000s we see the first big reaction to a gap in language study, Lynne Truss’s “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”, for punctuation, and since then people have jumped on to the language band-wagon, as it were, and tried to fill the gap by producing books; and grammar, of course, is at the forefront of all of this.

Dictionaries too, lots of good dictionaries have come out in the last ten years also. It’s always difficult to talk about the future of language; you never quite know what’s going to happen. Imagine a thousand years ago, when Latin was the dominant language of education, if you’d said that in a thousand years time nobody will really know much about Latin, they’d have thought you were mad. And the same point applies to English. In a thousand years time what will happen? We have no idea, we might all be speaking Martian by then, you know, who knows what will happen? All we can do is extrapolate from the trends that are taking place at the moment, and the trends right now move towards English becoming what we would technically call a diglossic language; that is operating at two distinct levels, a bit like in German, you know, where you’ve got High German and you’ve got local varieties of German. If you go around the English-speaking world, you see the two main forces driving language. One is the force for intelligibility; we have to understand each other. The other is the force for identity; we have to show who we are and where we’re from, and that produces dialects, of course. Now dialects in Britain, or in an individual country, are well known. What we’re seeing is those dialects writ large on a global scale, so we’re now talking about Nigerian English and Ghanaian English, and all these new ‘Englishes’ around the world. So this is where identity is fostering increasing diversity in language everywhere, but at the same time, all these countries have to talk to each other, so at the same time as the dialect diversity is taking place, we’re seeing a development of what we would call ‘standard English’, but now standard English at a global level. This is where the interesting question is, because while we can understand the local varieties of a shaping Nigerian, and Ghanaian, and so on, Englishes, what form will this world-standard English take in the next hundred or two-hundred years? At the moment, the signs are that it’s going to be a culturally neutral variety, in other words, it won’t show the locality of Australia, or Britain, or wherever, but influenced more than anything else by American English, simply because of the way history has gone in the last century or so. So at the moment, as you look around the world, you see kids in school coming out of school with two varieties of English. They go in with their local variety of English that they’ve learnt on the streets, in their families, and so on, expressing their local identity; ‘Singlish’, shall we say, in Singapore. And then they go to school and they learn international standard English, chiefly the written language and how to speak it in a more formal way, so they end up with two varieties of English. They’ve become bilingual in their own language, except they’re not languages, so bidialectal in their own language, or we might simply say ‘diglossic’.

Parts of Speech and Word Classes

Traditional grammar is the grammar that was taught for around 2,000 years - though, as Professor David Crystal reports in the video in our course resources, for a few decades from the 1960s up until the 1990s, grammar was absent in most writing classrooms.

Traditional grammar prescribes rules and follows what some people call the ‘Doctrine of Mechanical Correctness.’ While we acknowledge the importance of presenting mechanically flawless writing in academic and professional contexts, we accept that language practices change constantly. We certainly don’t follow the Latin-based, old-fashioned advice that forbids splitting an infinitive verb ‘to boldly go’ or, ending a sentence with a preposition (‘I have nobody to go with’). These rules were based on the fact that all Latin infinitives are expressed as one word. Also, that Latin prepositions are always placed before the noun, so can never appear at the end of a Latin sentence.

There are lots of other rules such as not starting a sentence with ‘and’, or ‘but’, or ‘because’ that you might remember from school, but these are what some grammarians call ‘bogus’ or ‘zombie’ rules. See Learn More, where two recent articles list these rules and tell you when it’s OK to break them.

Traditional grammar was based on nine parts of speech:

First of all the noun, which is a naming word, then we have the pronoun which is a noun substitute. A verb which is a doing or being word, an adjective that describes nouns or pronouns. An adverb which describes adjectives, verbs or other adverbs. An article, which specifies definiteness or indefiniteness of a noun. A conjunction which is a joining word. A preposition, which is a word that positions. An interjection which conveys emotion or sentiment.

Here’s a sentence that uses all the parts of speech in their traditional function, that is, doing their usual job.

However the good goblin apparently noticed me in the crowd, GOSH!

Take the word ‘face’, for example. In a sentence like ‘that’s such a happy face’, where the word ‘face’ names something,‘face’ works as a noun. But, in the sentence ‘I can’t face that mountain of work’, the word ‘face’ is functioning to describe an action, and therefore part of a verb phrase. You can see from these simple examples that we can’t categorically identify a word as a particular part of speech until we see it in action in a sentence. Many words can multitask, doing different jobs in different sentences.

The function of a word in a sentence—that is, its role and its relationship to other words—always determines its part of speech in that sentence. The linguists, I mentioned earlier examined the way words work in sentences and divided their roles or functions into two groups: form-class words and structure-class words.

The FORM-CLASS words (sometimes called open or lexical words) contribute content-meaning to the text and comprise the central subject matter in dictionaries.

Whereas STRUCTURE-CLASS words (sometimes called closed, grammatical, or function words) contribute grammatical-structural meaning to the text. That is, they signal the relationships between words in a sentence and function to make a text cohesive. They work rather like mortar to connect the bricks of the form-class words to each other. There’s a table listing the parts of speech in these two categories in the course resources section for those of you who are also learning linguistics. We’ll cover all of these as we move through the course. Let’s now move on to the sentence.

Structure of Patterns, Sentences, Phrases and Clauses

A sentence is a collection of words that is grammatically complete by itself and usually expresses a complete idea. It typically contains both a subject and a predicate. In written English, a sentence starts with a capital letter and ends with a period or full stop.

A predicate MUST contain a finite verb that relates to, or ‘agrees with’, the subject.

A finite verb is a verb that belongs to a subject and shows tense: I did my homework.

Sometimes the subject role is implied or ‘understood’: Do your homework.

An infinite verb (infinitive) is made up of the marker ‘to’ and the main part of the verb. I love to read.

Without a finite verb, a sentence is called a sentence fragment. For example, the dilemma that Hamlet expresses in his soliloquy

‘To be, or not to be’ is a sentence fragment because it has a verb (used twice, in fact) that is not finite (‘to be’ is an infinitive). However, ‘That is the question’ is a complete sentence because ‘is’ is a finite verb.

We can classify sentences by function (the work that they do in a sentence) and by form (their structure or their arrangement of words)

The four functions are:

Statement The cat sat on that mat. Question: Did the cat sit on that mat? Command: Sit on that mat, cat! Exclamation: Wow! Look at that cat!

We need to digress for a moment to explain the term ‘clause’. A clause, like a simple sentence, is a string of words that has a subject (even if it is understood) and a predicate that includes a finite verb. An independent (main, principal) clause can stand alone as a sentence.

For example: I love reading. A dependent (subordinate) clause does not make sense on its own. For example: Because I love reading …

Clauses can combine to create compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences.

We have highlighted clauses in the sentences below about Sherlock Holmes. THEE orange components are independent or main clauses. The blue ones are dependent clauses.

There are four main sentence forms:

A simple is made up of one independent clause

Sherlock Holmes waited.

A compound sentence is made up of two or more independent clauses joined by either a semicolon or a coordinating conjunction such as for, and, nor, but, or, yet, or so. When a comma is used in front of one of these conjunctions to introduce an independent clause, these conjunctions are called by the mnemonic the COMMA FANBOYS.

Sherlock Holmes waited; however, Watson delayed his visit. Sherlock Holmes waited, and was missed at Lloyd’s registers.

A complex sentence is made up of one dependent clause subordinated to one independent clause, either at the beginning (Left-branching), in the middle (mid-branching), or at the end (right-branching).

While Watson moved the lamp, Sherlock Holmes waited. (Left Branching) Sherlock Holmes, though he was anxious to have his dinner, waited. (Mid Branching) Sherlock Holmes waited, while Watson moved the lamp. (Right Branching)

A compound-complex is made up of a second independent clause added to a complex sentence, or a dependant clause added to a compound sentence While Watson moved the lamp, Sherlock Holmes waited, and was missed at Lloyd’s registers. Sherlock Holmes waited, and was missed at Lloyd’s registers, because he was a good customer.

In a wonderful book by Stanley Fish, How to write a sentence and how to read one, he asks: ‘How does every component in a sentence function to contribute to/to extend/to maintain the ensemble of relationships?’

Fish advises writing students to practise composing sentences and then explain what you have done.

Following this lecture, you will find a collection of ‘chunks’ of texts that you can use to construct complete, coherent sentences using the core sentence Sherlock Holmes waited. There are no right or wrong answers to this activity and you will be surprised to know how many sentences are possible in this exercise.

Yet another way to categorise sentences is into loose and periodic forms. A loose sentence positions the important information at the beginning. Plain language reforms have become law in many countries because law makers believe that citizens should have access to documents they can understand.

Can you see why this is a loose sentence?

A periodic sentence, on the other hand, positions the important information at the END. Because law makers believe that citizens should have access to documents they can understand, plain language reforms have become law in many countries.

Can you see why this is a periodic sentence?

To conclude this section, here’s a table to introduce subjects, predicates, and objects, which we’ll cover next week when we look at verbs.

Common Sentence-Level Problems

The key sentence problems that you need to avoid are the sentence fragment, the fused or run-on sentence, and the comma splice.

A sentence that lacks a subject or a finite verb is a fragment.

A fragment can be a dependent clause, a subject without a predicate, a phrase, or even a single word.

The following are all fragments, which are undesirable in formal writing:

While Sherlock waited. The detective Sherlock Holmes.

With his fingertips together. Sherlock.

The fused (or run-on) sentence

Can you see that two sentences are fused here?

The Comma Splice

Can you see that a comma is used to join or splice two sentences?

Remember, commas don’t join; they cut!

A way to correct these sentences would be to write:

Sherlock Holmes waited and Watson delayed his visit. Or, perhaps, Sherlock Holmes waited. Watson delayed his visit.

You should avoid the problems just listed and try to write direct, dynamic sentences.

You should also learn to sidestep the following problems: ‘and-ness’, ‘is-ness’, ‘of-ness’, and list-like sentences.

Avoid ‘and-ness’—constructing long sentences by stringing too many clauses together with ‘and’.

For example: Proposals are to be submitted in duplicate, and enclosed in a sealed envelope, and endorsed with a reference number, and shall be lodged at the address below.

Could you rewrite this sentence by eliminating the ‘and’s’? You’ll have a chance later to look more closely at this sentence and have a go at rewriting it more effectively.

Avoid listlike sentences:

For example: The thing about a sentence with a listlike form is that there are a number of tiny points with independent bits of meaning that are set out in the sentence in a line so that the series of words and phrases reads like so many pieces of popcorn strung out on a string. [from Linda Flower’s Problem-solving Strategies for Writing]

I don’t know about you, but I thought that sentence was never going to end! Could you do better?

Avoid ‘is-ness’—relying on parts of the ‘weak’ verb ‘to be’

For example:

The intention of the tax office is to audit their records. Or, how about some Shakespeare?

This tyrant, whose sole name is a blister on our tongues, was once thought honest. What verbs could replace ‘is’ to make these sentences stronger?

We’ll look at the tense of verbs next week, but the following table will help you to see the parts of the verb ‘to be’ in present and past tense.

Avoid ‘OF-ness’—this occurs when the word ‘of’ is used too frequently.

For example: Our lack OF knowledge about local conditions precluded determination OF committee action effectiveness in fund allocation to those areas in greatest need OF assistance.

When you’ve finished watching this vídeo, have a go at rewriting our example sentences using the text boxes provided.

This week we have looked at the form and function of sentences, the problems related to sentence structure and ways to make your sentences coherent and compelling by avoiding sentence-level problems. Next week,we’ll look at verbs, the part of speech that Karen Elizabeth Gordon, who wrote the transitive vampire grammar books, calls ‘the heartthrob’ of the sentence.