Practical syntax
Richard Hudson, May 1995
1. Practical syntax?
Some people - perhaps most people who are likely to read this paper - have a practical interest
in sentence-structure (the subject-matter of syntax). Here are some practical reasons for such
an interest:
P When learning a foreign language you have to learn how to use words in phrases and
sentences; the more clearly you understand the patterns you are learning, the more
successful you will be.
P The same is true when you teach a foreign language; again, the clearer your
understanding of sentence structure, the more you will be able to help your students.
P If your responsibility is to help young children to develop their language skills, you
need to understand the skills they already have as well as those that are still beyond their
grasp. This applies as much to parents or grandparents as to professional first-language
teachers.
P Some unfortunate individuals lose, or never acquire, the normal skills; speech and
language therapists who try to treat them must understand exactly what it is that is
missing before they try to provide a remedy.
P When you communicate about anything which is at all complicated you have to select
sentence-structures so that they convey the intended message with the minimum of pain
to the hearer or reader. There is never a single way to communicate a given message there are always alternatives. (As I type this, I am writing two or three versions of most
sentence before I find one that I can't improve.) The better we understand sentencestructure, the better we can make these choices.
P In these high-tech days an increasing number of people are trying to program
computers to understand what humans write or say, and to produce human-like writing
and speech. This requires a profound understanding of sentence-structure, and this
understanding must be severely practical because it has to be translated into detailed
instructions for the computer.
Fortunately there is a large measure of agreement on how sentences are structured. For
example, consider this example sentence:
(1)
We drank the coffee.
We grammarians would all agree on a rough classification of the words (personal pronoun +
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past-tense verb + definite article + singular common noun), using traditional terms which (in
some cases) date back to the Romans or even to the Ancient Greeks. We could also agree that
the coffee `hangs together', as a phrase, because both words help to identify the same bit of
meaning; and that we and the coffee have distinct `roles' or `grammatical functions' in the
sentence, called `subject' and `object'. Furthermore, the same kind of classification can be
applied to sentences in other languages, like the Turkish translation of sentence (1).
(2)
Kahveyi içtik.
In this case of course the details are different: only the common noun and the verb survive the
translation, as the meanings of we and the are expressed differently (by suffix-like elements)
in Turkish. But any grammarian would describe kahveyi as the object of içtik (or of the whole
sentence), and would accept that ik shows what the subject would have been if there had been
one.
I think the agreement extends to the following generalisations about sentence structure:
P Sentence structure is closely linked to meaning, but the same meaning can be
expressed by different sentence structures (especially when we consider different
languages).
P At the heart of sentence structure are the relations among words. These are of two
types: the grammatical functions (e.g. subject and object), and the links which bind
words into larger units - into phrases, into clauses and ultimately into sentences.
P Sentence structures are controlled by the rules (which constitute the grammar of the
language concerned). The rules control the ways in which words are combined and the
meanings which the various combinations express; they refer to the relations among
words, but also to the ways in which these are reflected in the order of the words
concerned and in the word-classes (e.g. verb, common noun, article, singular, past
tense) to which they belong.
However, alongside this agreement there is a great deal of disagreement, both about general
principles and about the details of how particular kinds of sentence should be analysed. This
disagreement is largely a product of the last 40 years, which have seen a great expansion in
research on sentence structure and a proliferation of alternative theories as well as of
grammars of particular languages1.
This expansion is a mixed blessing for someone in need of practical help. On the one
hand, I feel sure that we all understand at least some parts of sentence-structure better now
than we did 40 years ago; but on the other hand the choice is overwhelming. Unfortunately,
1
There are a dozen or so `important' rival theories, bearing names like Minimalism
(Chomsky 1993), Government-Binding Theory (Chomsky 1986), Head-driven Phrase
Structure Grammar (Pollard and Sag 1994), Lexical Functional Grammar (Bresnan 1982),
Categorial Grammar (Wood 1993), Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1990), Systemic
Functional Grammar (Halliday 1985), Relational Grammar (Blake 1990) and Functional
Grammar (Siewierska 1991).
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the choice matters; some approaches are much more helpful than others. Different users no
doubt have different needs, but in my opinion the following list covers the most important
things in a truly `practical' approach to syntax:
P Rather obviously, it must be as near as possible to `true', in the sense of being
compatible with all the relevant facts. It is no help to have a grammar which is simply
used, but also simply wrong.
P It must be as complicated as the facts require, but no more so. Simple sentences
should have simple analyses, and complicated sentences correspondingly complicated
analyses.
P It should offer a usable diagramming system. Even a sentence as simple as We drank
the coffee has a structure which is hard to describe in prose, but it should be easy to
present as a diagram. To be usable a diagramming system should be visually clear and
reasonably economical of space.
P It must be easy to learn cumulatively, so that each new item can be used as soon as it
is learned.
P The more comprehensive it is, the better. The ideal is a grammar which allows us to
handle every word in every sentence that we try to analyse. No such grammar exists, but
it is reasonable to look for a grammar which handles the vast majority of words - 99%
coverage is a realistic target.
The aim of this paper is to present a theory of sentence-structure which, in my opinion,
satisfies all these criteria as well as any others that are available, and better than some. It is
called Word Grammar and has been described in two books (Hudson 1984, 1990). For several
years I have been teaching it to undergraduates who learn enough in one term to be able to do
an almost complete syntactic analysis of any ordinary text in English. The analysis they learn
is as near to the truth as I have been able to make it (after 30 years of work in this area); it is
as simple or as complicated as the patterns being analysed; there is a simple diagramming
system; and they can apply it from the first week.
2. Word Grammar: an overview
We start with the Word Grammar (henceforth WG) analysis of our sample sentence:
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Diagram 1
This diagram is just as simple as the structure it represents. The sentence contains four words,
so the diagram shows precisely four units (one per word) and their interrelations. These
relations are shown by the arrows, which point towards the word which bears the grammatical
function shown by the label (where `s' stands for `subject', `o' for `object' and `c' for
`complement'). The vertical arrow points at the one word which has no grammatical function,
drank. (The reason for it will become clear below.) The fact that the coffee is a phrase is
shown by the arrow which links the directly to coffee.
The simplicity of the diagram isn't the result of ignoring a lot of detail which is
uninteresting or unimportant. It represents a scientific claim that there really is nothing else to
say about the syntax of this sentence, a claim which could be defended against counterclaims. It may be wrong, of course, but I don't know at present of any reason for doubting it.
However, it is important to make clear exactly what I am claiming.
I would certainly agree that a complete analysis of every aspect of this sentence would
go far beyond the analysis shown. On the one hand we can say a great deal about its meaning
- who the word we refers to, the time reference of drank, the semantic relations between the
coffee and the drinking, and so on. On the other hand, we can also say something about the
internal structures of the words (described in terms of consonants, vowels and syllables). The
meaning involves a semantic structure, and the sounds are part of a phonological structure;
both these structures would be part of a complete linguistic analysis of the sentence, but not
part of a syntactic analysis (which is concerned, as I said at the outset, with sentence-structure
- how the words are combined with each other).
Nor am I claiming that the diagram shows the whole of the syntactic analysis. The
diagram contains three kinds of labels: labels for word-classes, for word-features, and for
grammatical functions; but some of these labels imply one or two other more general labels as
well. For example, We is labelled `pN', short for `pronoun'; but (according to WG, and most
other theories) pronouns are a kind of noun, and (of course) nouns are a kind of word, so `pN'
implies `N' (for `noun') and `word' as well. Since these extra labels are completely predictable
there is no need to include them in the diagram. I shall say more later about the grammaticalfunction labels.
A single example gives a `taste' of how WG works - what the diagrams look like, and
the kind of information they contain. As we consider further examples below I hope to show
that they are as complex as required, but no more so; and that they show everything that a
syntactic analysis should show. I can report that the system can be learned cumulatively, that
it is usable, and that it is reasonably comprehensive. My evidence for these claims is that my
undergraduate students do learn it cumulatively (adding a new part of the grammar each
week), that they do learn to apply it to ordinary bits of English (or other languages), and that a
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term's teaching brings them to the stage where they can probably deal confidently with about
97% of the words in an average text which they themselves have chosen.
But what about truth? Nothing in this life is perfect, and the same is certainly true of
every theory of grammar, including WG. In syntax even some of the facts are unclear and in
such cases it is perhaps unwise to talk of truth; but there are many parts of syntax where the
facts are clear, and truth really is relevant. Anyone who builds a theory of syntax must
confront these facts honestly as a test of the theory, and reject (or at least modify) the theory
when it fails. I have spent decades doing precisely this, and the result is a good approximation
to the truth. Unfortunately the world is full of other linguists who can say precisely the same,
but who have come to very different conclusions from each other (and from me). The study of
syntax is a central part of the science of linguistics, and is notoriously frought with
controversy.
Some of the differences between theories are certainly not important, but equally
certainly others are; so any `consumer' of syntactic theories should treat any theory (including
WG) with caution. Behind every theory lies a large body of arguments, decisions and mindchanging which may have been debated in the technical journals and monographs but which
the consumer may not have time to explore. The result is that some parts of any analysis are
to some extent controversial.
Even our simple sentence contains a controversial point: the analysis of the. According
to Diagram 1, the object of drank is the, not coffee; whereas traditional analyses would
reverse this relationship. Linguists are divided on this question. Some would agree with me
(technically, they recognise `determiner phrases'), and others would disagree, believing that
the should be treated as part of a phrase whose main word is coffee, a `noun-phrase'. It isn't
just a matter of taste; there are relevant facts and arguments for and against. For example, in
English the belongs to a group of words called `determiners' which includes a, this, that,
some, any, his and some others. A word such as book needs a determiner (we cannot say **I
bought book, but any determiner before book makes the sentence grammatical); but most
determiners can be used without a following common noun (I bought this/that/some/any/his).
This suggests that the determiner is the obligatory part of a phrase consisting of a determiner
plus a common noun, so it should be the determiner, rather than the common noun, that
carries the external relations (e.g. the object link to drank). (Another controversial question is
how determiners fit into the system of word-classes; according to Diagram 1 they are a type
of pronoun, which makes them also a type of noun, but many linguists treat them as a
completely separate word-class. Once again there are relevant facts, and it is possible to
debate the issue.)
One advantage of taking the rather than coffee as the object of drank is to reduce the
differences between English and other languages. Take the Turkish translation of this
sentence, for example: Kahveyi içtik. The ending -i on kahveyi gives two important pieces of
information about this word: it is definite, and it is the object of the verb içtik. The
definiteness is conveyed in English by the determiner (in this case, the), but our analysis gives
the English determiner the object function as well. It has often been suggested that the wordparts of languages such as Turkish could easily be recognised as separate syntactic words,
which are combined into single words only for phonological purposes; so maybe kahveyi
could also be written kahvey + i (with `+' to show that the two words belong together in
phonology). There may be good arguments against this analysis, but if we accept it the WG
analysis might be as in Diagram 2.
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Diagram 2
I have labelled -i simply `OD' (for `object definite'), since I have no reason for thinking it is a
pronoun (in contrast with English the). However classification is less important than the
`geometry' of the diagram. If we compare this diagram with the one for We drank the coffee,
the two main differences between English and Turkish stand out clearly: the object follows
the verb in English but precedes it in Turkish, and there has to be a separate subject in
English, but not in Turkish. But more subtly, in both languages the word for `coffee' is only
indirectly related to the verb, by a little word that marks definiteness and which in Turkish,
but not in English, can only carry one grammatical function, `object'.
3. Dependencies
The most important part of a syntactic analysis is what it tells us about the relationships
among the words - how they combine to make a meaningful sentence. (In contrast, the
classification of the words is much less less relevant to the meaning, and correspondingly less
important.) This information is carried in a WG analysis by the labelled arrows, so we need to
consider these a little more carefully. They are also probably the most controversial part of the
theory, which is another reason for explaining them.
What I have said so far about the
arrows is that each one points towards the word that has the grammatical function indicated
by the label; the arrow which carries the label `s' (for `subject') points at we, the one labelled
`o' (for `object') points at the (coffee), and so on. However, we can now take a step further:
each of these arrows shows a dependency between two words. The grammatical function is
always the function of the dependent in relation to the other word, so the arrow always points
towards the dependent word. In our example, both the subject and the object depend on the
verb, and (according to my analysis at any rate), the common noun (coffee, kahvey) depends
on the determiner or object marker (the, -i). The main idea behind this notion of dependency
is that each word depends on the word which links it to the rest of the sentence, and which
explains why it is used. The latter is often called the `head' of the former, so in we drank, we
is a dependent of drank and drank is the head of we. Table 1 lists some of the most common
types of dependency found in English, and Diagram 3 shows how a more complicated English
sentence is analysed.
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Diagram 3
head word
dependent word
function
order
example
verb
noun
subject
<
we drank
noun
adjective
preadjunct
<
nice coffee
noun
noun
"
<
London hospital
adjective
adverb
"
<
really nice
verb
noun
object
>
drank it
verb
adverb
particle
>
fended off
preposition
noun
complement
>
in London
determiner
common noun
"
>
the coffee
any
preposition
adjunct
>
lived in (London)
Table 1
This kind of dependency-based analysis allows some very simple generalisations about
word order. From my very limited knowledge of Turkish I gather that most dependencies are
head-final - that is, the head word follows the word which depends on it. For example, verbs
follow their objects (as well as their subjects), postpositions are used instead of prepositions,
and so on. English word order tends to be the other way round, with heads preceding their
dependents (e.g. verbs precede their objects and we have prepositions instead of
postpositions); but this is only a tendency, as there are a significant number of dependencies
with head-final order. In Table 1 the first four dependencies are head-final, while the last five
are of the more typical head-initial type.
This kind of analysis is very controversial in modern linguistics because it treats phrases
as secondary by-products of the dependencies. In short, (with one major exception which I
shall discuss below) all the units of syntax are single words. For example, the analysis of
We drank the coffee recognises just four units, one per word, and does not recognise the
coffee as a separate unit which could be classified or bear a grammatical function; and
similarly for our second example in Diagram 3, where its London hospital closure plans is not
treated as a single unit, but as five separate words. Most modern theories of syntax put
`phrase structure' at the centre of syntax, and derive the relations between individual words
from their relationships to the phrases. In contrast, the WG analysis treats the word-word
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relationships as basic, and leaves the larger units implicit. For example, the fact that London
depends on hospital means that these two words `belong together', in contrast with its and
London which are not related in this way (although they are physically next to each other in
our sentence). The reason for ignoring phrases in this way is quite simple: once the wordword dependencies have been analysed, the phrases are simply redundant. A phrase is just a
group of words which all depend, directly or indirectly, on one single word, so adding phraseunits to the analysis would add no extra information whatever. This is a testable claim on
which WG rests, and may (of course) be wrong; but so far I know of no good evidence to the
contrary. The exclusive focus on word-word relations has a very important practical
consequence: the whole system is much easier to learn and to diagram than one which uses
phrases as well as words.
Having said all this, however, the dependency analysis has to be supplemented by a very
important general principle in order to capture one of the most attractive insights of phrasebased syntax: phrases tend to be continuous. In general, if two words belong to the same
phrase they cannot be separated by another word which does not belong to that phrase. For
example, the off of fended off (in our earlier sentence) may stand either before or after the
object, but it cannot interrupt the object phrase (the phrase rooted in the object word an, i.e.
an onslaught on its London hospital closure plans). In our example off precedes the whole
phrase (fended off an onslaught ..); but the only other possible position for it is right at the
end (which is admittedly a very awkward choice, though permitted by the grammar). What we
cannot say (or write) is something like *fended an off onslaught .. or *fended an onslaught off
on its ... Similarly, the phrase of good students is possible, but *good of students is not
because the phrase good students is interrupted by of, which does not belong to it.
There are a number of different ways to import this insight into dependency analysis but
the way I prefer is to impose a very general principle, called the No-tangling Principle:
The No-tangling Principle
Every sentence has a dependency structure in which:
P no dependency arrows tangle, and
P one dependency arrow points at every word.
Diagram 4 shows how this principle rules out various kinds of dependencies which would
otherwise be possible (with ungrammatical patterns marked with `*').
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Diagram 4
This principle kills three birds with one stone.
P It explains the ungrammaticality of some sentences which would otherwise be
permitted.
P It helps novices to check their diagrams for errors.
P It explains the vertical arrow which connects the verb in We drank the coffee to
nothing at all. The `main' verb in a sentence is (by definition) the one word in the
sentence that does not depend on any other word; but without an arrow, it causes no
tangling in examples like *Red drink wine (the last one in Diagram 4), which are
presumably bad for the same reason as those which tangle. The vertical arrow shows a
`potential' head, because almost any independent sentence may be turned into a
subordinate one, in which the tangling would involve a real dependency. (For instance,
Drink red wine! can be quoted as He told us to drink red wine, where drink depends on
to; in this larger sentence, positioning red before drink would make the dependency
between red and wine tangle with the one between to and drink.)
When introducing the No-tangling Principle I said `phrases tend to be continuous'. This
is only a tendency, to which there are well-known exceptions. In fact, it is the exceptions that
have kept theoretical linguists busy over the last few decades. This is where we use terms like
`raising', `extraposition' and `extraction'. The general principle still applies to most
constructions, but in these special cases there are rules which override it. For example, take
the apparently straightforward English sentence We were drinking the coffee. There are three
almost indisputable facts:
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P There are very good reasons for taking we as the subject of were (e.g. it is were that
changes places with we in the question: Were we drinking the coffee?);
P There are almost equally good reasons for taking we as the subject of drinking as well.
P The non-dependent word is were, rather than drinking (were can be used without
drinking, as in the answer We were.; but drinking cannot be used without were, unless
we is omitted as well: *We drinking the coffee.)
When we put these three facts together, it turns out that the dependency from drinking to we
must tangle with the vertical arrow. This can be seen in the first structure of Diagram 5.
Diagram 5
This tangling is not just a consequence of the decision to use vertical arrows; the tangling still
occurs if we turn our sentence into a subordinate clause: I know that we were drinking the
coffee, in which were depends on that (for reasons that I cannot give for lack of space). This
is the second sentence analysed in Diagram 5.
The conclusion, then, is that some cases of tangling are permitted; in other words, some
phrases are discontinuous (e.g. the phrase we ... drinking the coffee). How can we reconcile
this conclusion with the No-tangling Principle? Answer: simply by interpreting the principle
as saying that every sentence's total dependency structure must include a substructure which
is tangle-free and single-arrowed. In other words, there must be a `skeleton' structure which
holds all the words together without tangling, but there may be other dependencies added
onto this structure (such as the dependency from drinking to we). The skeleton provides a
kind of `surface' structure, to which `deeper' relationships may be added. A practical
diagramming convention arises from this claim: we can show the skeleton of surface
relationships above the words (on the surface), while adding the deeper ones below the
words. This is what I have done in the bottom structure in Diagram 5. The skeleton above the
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words must be tangle-free and contain precisely one arrow per word, but much more
complicated and `messy' patterns are allowed below the line, controlled only by the specifics
of the grammar for the language concerned. Diagram 6 shows how complex the deep patterns
can be for quite an ordinary English sentence.
Diagram 6
This very brief survey of how WG analysis works has shown how the structure of a
whole sentence can be seen as nothing but a collection of relationships between pairs of
single words. However, I mentioned that there was a major exception to this principle, which
we must now consider. The exception is one particular kind of syntactic relationship which is
quite different from the dependencies which we have considered so far: coordination. In a
sentence like John and Mary came, two words (John, Mary) are coordinated, with and
signalling this relationship; but this is an relationship between equals, unlike dependencies - a
completely different kind of relationship. The best way to handle coordination seems to be to
recognise `word-strings' such as John and Mary consisting of smaller word-strings, the
`conjuncts'. In the example just given, each of these smaller word-strings actually consists of
just one word, but of course they could have been much more complicated (e.g. the man with
the beard and the woman with the walking-stick). The diagramming is simple: brackets, with
curly brackets {...} for the whole coordination and square brackets [..] for each conjunct:
{[John] and [Mary]} came, or to take a more complicated example:
(3)
We {[drank the coffee] and [ate the food]} before we left.
The two kinds of structure, based on dependency and coordination, are closely linked, but we
unfortunately do not have time to explore them further. Instead of a proper discussion I shall
just give a diagram for one example.
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Diagram 7
This completes the survey of WG syntax, and we now start a brief review of various
ways in which the system can be applied to practical problems.
4. Application: L1 study
I start with the study of the mother-tongue, which occupies a major part of the school
curriculum in any country. England and Wales are just emerging from a strange grammar-free
period, which contrasts with the situation found in many European countries (e.g. parts of
Eastern Europe, Germany and France) where children all learn something about the grammar
of their own language. There are several good reasons for including first-language grammar in
the curriculum (which I discussed at length in Hudson 1992).
P Children should be proud of their language, including its grammar, which is hardly
possible without some study of it. Each language has a character of its own, which
makes it interestingly different from every other language, and linguists can offer a
collection of `parameters' on which languages are known to vary. These parameters
involve:
P several general questions about word order,
P the amount of inflectional variation in words,
P the extent to which syntactic words fuse into longer phonological words (as in
Turkish),
P how subjects and objects are distinguished,
P how relative clauses are formed,
and much, much else. It is hard to see why any child should leave school without some
idea of their language's general `character', and perhaps also something of its history. I
have the impression that most people, and especially children, find it much easier to
relate to texts than to the grammatical system itself, so what is needed is a system such
as WG which is easy to apply to texts and allows them to develop their own
generalisations out of texts.
P The need for linguistic pride is especially true of children whose mother-tongue has
no official status as a standard language. In the UK, about 80-90% of children are in this
situation as speakers of non-standard dialects of English, and because of the low social
status of such dialects they are convinced that what they speak is simply bad English.
This has a number of undesirable social and educational consequences, and is quite
unnecessary. Speakers of non-standard dialects and languages should take just as much
pride in their language as those of standard languages, and once again a good way to
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achieve this is to teach them something about their language's structure by the analysis
of ordinary texts (preferably the children's own ordinary speech).
P A related reason for teaching about the first language is that most school systems have
the task of teaching the national standard language to children who do not speak it
natively. The better the children understand their own language, the more easily they
will understand the differences between it and the standard - and especially if they can
understand diagrams (such as WG diagrams) illustrating both. For example, a very
widespread non-standard feature of English is the use of non-subject pronoun forms
(e.g. me, him) when the subject is coordinated:
(4)
a
b
(Standard)
(Non-standard)
John and I went.
John and me went.
This is a very interesting innovation in English, which may eventually be accepted into
standard English, but at present children (who almost all use the non-standard form in
speaking) have to learn the standard rules. School-teachers tend not to teach the rules
directly (perhaps because they themselves are unclear about them), so children at
present are left to work out the rules for themselves (with the result that some speakers
regularly use subject pronoun forms such as I and he in all coordinated structures,
regardless of their grammatical function: I saw John and he). How much better to draw
syntactic diagrams for the sentences I went and John and I went, as in Diagram 8, and
then to compare the words that standard and non-standard dialects put in the slot
indicated - I for standard, me for non-standard.
Diagram 8
There are a number of other good reasons for teaching syntactic analysis as part of
mother-tongue teaching, but we shall consider them below under other headings.
5. Application: L2 study
For a decade or so grammar has been unfashionable in the teaching of second languages, but
at present it seems to be making a come-back. This strikes me as a welcome development,
provided that it avoids the mindless rote-learning that used to characterise some grammarlearning in the Good Old Days. Here are my reasons for favouring the use of syntactic
analysis in L2 teaching:
P If the students can already analyse their mother-tongue (e.g. by drawing simple
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structure diagrams), it must be helpful for them to apply the same system to the L2.
Where the two grammars are similar, this will appear visually; and where they are
different, it will be easy to localise the difference. For instance, if functions like `subject'
and `object' can be taken for granted, the elementary differences between subjects or
objects in Turkish and English can be explained very easily. Without these linking
concepts the whole of the L2 is equally mysterious.
P In the discussion of L1 study I said that languages have very general features which
allow them to be compared. Every such feature is relevant to L2 study, as it offers the
possibility of a broad generalisation which may help the learner. For example, a Turkish
learner of English ought presumably to understand the general difference between the
inflectional and agglutinative systems found in these two languages; but generalisations
about word order can help too. Diagrams of sentence-structure make any of these
differences much more concrete and easier to explain.
P Students presumably learn an L2 at least in part by experiencing it - by reading it and
listening to it - but they will only benefit from this experience to the extent that they
understand what they are reading. This means not only understanding the meaning, but
also understanding the syntactic patterns through which this meaning is expressed. It is
often possible to work out the meaning (by intelligent reading between the lines) just by
taking the meanings of the individual words, without having much idea of how the
sentence's syntax works; but this cleverness leaves the learner in the same state of
syntactic ignorance as before. For example, suppose a foreign student met the following
sentences which appeared almost next to each other in an English newspaper (The
Guardian, 11th May 1995):
(5)
a
b
Lord McAlpine used the European newspaper to attack his party again.
... the politician who knows his country to be on the wrong track.
Superficially their structures are the same; in both cases the learner could identify a verb
(used, knows), followed by a noun-phrase (the European newspaper, his country), followed
by to plus an infinitive phrase (to attack his party again, to be on the wrong track). And yet
their meaning structures are quite different. The learner needs to be aware that their syntactic
structures are also different, as shown in Diagram 9.
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Diagram 9
The first sentence is easy - the to-phrase defines the purpose for which Lord McAlpine used
the European newspaper, and is completely separate from the other phrases which depend on
the verb used. The problem arises for our foreign learner if she thinks the second sentence's
syntactic structure is the same; in this case there is an extra arrow (below the line of words)
which shows that his country is the subject of to be, just as it would have been in who knows
that his country is on the wrong track (which has the same meaning).
The general point which this example illustrates is that L2-teaching would be much
easier if diagrams could be used. They could be used in various ways - e.g. by the teacher
when explaining a construction or by the student when puzzling through a difficult text, or
when being tested. A student who can draw the correct diagram for a sentence can certainly
understand its structure, but one who understands diagramming in general but can't draw a
diagram for that sentence probably doesn't understand its structure.
6. Application: Complex communication
Some sentences are much harder to understand than others. In some cases the difficulty is due
to the complexity and density of the ideas, but in others it is simply a matter of syntax. All the
following sentences express the same meaning, but they are not equally easy to understand:
(6)
a
b
c
That she likes him enough to marry him surprises me.
It surprises me that she likes him enough to marry him.
I am surprised that she likes him enough to marry him.
The sentence whose structure is the most straightforward is (a), where the subject of surprises
is the subordinate clause itself (that she likes him enough to marry him); but this is the
hardest of the three to read. In contrast, the other two sentences both contain one more word
(it or am) and have parts which are much less directly related to the meaning. Why should
they nevertheless be easier to read? The answer will suggest advice that we can give to our
students to help them to present complex information in as simple a way as possible.
The structures for the three sentences are shown in Diagram 10.
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Diagram 10
These dependency diagrams carry an extra piece of information which takes the form of a
number under each word-space; for example, in the first sentence `2' stands after that, `3' after
she, and so on. This number is a measure of the work that the reader has to do while reading
that part of the sentence; more specifically, it shows how many incomplete dependencies the
reader has to hold in her mind at that point.
Imagine the words of each sentence being presented to you one at a time on a screen.
After reading the word that, and no other word, you have two incomplete dependencies to
hold in your mind until you can complete them. One is the dependency between that and its
head, the main verb (which eventually, much later, will turn out to be surprises); the other is
the dependency between it and the verb inside the subordinate clause (which will be likes).
After reading the next word, she, both these dependencies are still incomplete, but there is a
third: the dependency between she and its head. After likes the number falls to 2 because two
of these dependencies have been completed, but a new one has opened up: the one between
likes and its object. Of course, if you look at the diagram there is a third dependency after
likes, between it and enough; but the dependency between them is labelled `a', for `adjunct',
which means that it is not `expected' by the head, likes. Any dictionary ought to say that like
takes an object, but not that it takes a `quantity phrase' like enough to .... Therefore this
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dependency does not count, for the simple reason that you, as reader, don't know anything
about it until you read the word enough. And so on through all the sentences.
Simply
glancing at the figures under the first sentence shows that they are higher than those under the
other two sentences, but we can make the comparison more precise by calculating the average
load per word: 1.6 for the first sentence, 1.0 for the second, and 0.9 for the third. I call this
measure the sentence's `dependency density'; and this, I suggest, is why the first is so much
harder to read than the other two: because it is constructed in such a way that a lot of
dependencies are incomplete at the same time. If writers could be taught to recognise this
kind of structure, and to know how to replace it by a more readable alternative, then every
reader would benefit.
This is not the only way to measure syntactic complexity, of course; but it gives
objectively calculated figures which correspond to more intuitive notions of complexity, and
it only works with theories like WG which use dependency diagrams.
7. Conclusions
No doubt the list of applications could be extended, but my main objective was to introduce
the Word Grammar approach to syntactic analysis and to show that it has some practical uses.
Some of these practical targets could perhaps be achieved by almost any approach to syntax,
but my claim has been that WG offers a particularly good combination of theoretical
sophistication (`truth'), teachability, usability and comprehensiveness.
References
Blake, B. 1990. Relational Grammar. Routledge.
Bresnan, J. 1982. The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations. MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. 1993. A Minimalist Program for Linguistic Theory. In K. Hale and S. J. Keyser
(eds.) The View from Building 20: Essays in Linguistics in Honor of Sylvain Bromburger.
MIT Press, 1-52.
Halliday, M. 1985. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. Arnold.
Hudson, R. A. 1984. Word Grammar. Blackwell.
Hudson, R. A. 1990. English Word Grammar. Blackwell.
Hudson, R. A. 1992. Teaching Grammar. A guide to the National Curriculum. Blackwell.
Langacker, R. W. 1990. Concept, Image and Symbol. The cognitive basis of grammar.
Mouton de Gruyter.
Pollard, C. and Sag, I. 1994. Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. University of Chicago
Press.
Siewierkska, A. 1991. Functional Grammar. Routledge.
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Practical importance of syntax
P L2-learning
P L2-teaching
P L1-teaching
P Language pathology
P Complex communication
P Computer-systems for understanding language
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Agreement on sentence-structure
P Closely linked to meaning
P but different structures can express the same meaning
P Based on two kinds of relations among words:
P grammatical functions (e.g. subject, object),
P phrase-forming links
P Controlled by rules which refer to:
P meanings
P grammatical functions
P word order
P word-classes
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Theoretical disagreements about sentence-structure
Some alternative theories:
P Minimalism
P Government-Binding Theory
P Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar
P Lexical Functional Grammar
P Categorial Grammar
P Cognitive Grammar
P Systemic Functional Grammar
P Relational Grammar
P Functional Grammar
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Requirements of a `practical' approach to syntax:
P As true as possible
P As complicated as the facts - no more, no less
P Diagramm-able
P Usable as learned
P As comprehensive as possible
e.g. `WORD GRAMMAR'
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Some Principles of Word Grammar
P All units of syntax are single words (NOT phrases).
P Phrases are implicit in the dependencies.
P Most phrases are CONTINUOUS (not interrupted).
The No-tangling Principle:
Every sentence has a dependency structure in which:
P no dependency arrows tangle, and
P one dependency arrow points at every word.
P Excludes ungrammatical sequences.
P Helps novices to check their diagrams.
P Explains the vertical `root' arrow.
P These phrases are shown by `surface' dependencies above the words.
P Some phrases are interrupted.
e.g. We were drinking the coffee.
P Discontinuous phrases are shown by `deep' dependencies below the words.
P Coordination is exceptional, and cannot be shown by dependencies:
P Shown by brackets:
{[John] and [Mary]} left.
We {[drank the coffee] and [ate the food]} before we left.
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Some applications of practical syntax
P L1 study
P L2 study
P measuring syntactic complexity
P L1 study
P to make children proud of L1
e.g. they could know something about:
P word order
P balance between inflection, agglutination, isolation
P how grammatical functions are distinguished.
P how relative clauses are formed.
P etc
P especially important if it is a non-standard language
P to explain how standard language differs from children's L1
e.g. Non-standard I went out.
Standard
John and me went out.
I went out.
John and I went out.
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Some applications of practical syntax
P L1 study
P L2 study
P measuring syntactic complexity
P L2 study
P to build on existing knowledge of L1 and allow direct comparison of L2 and L1.
P to make comparisons visible and concrete
P to force the learner to pay attention to the syntactic structures behind the
meanings which can be guessed.
VERB NOUN-PHRASE
Lord McAlpine
used
the European newspaper
the politician who knows his country
INFINITIVEPHRASE
to attack his party again.
to be on the wrong track.
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Some applications of practical syntax
P L1 study
P L2 study
P measuring syntactic complexity
P measuring syntactic complexity
a That she likes him enough to marry him surprises me.
b It surprises me that she likes him enough to marry him.
c I am surprised that she likes him enough to marry him.
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