ENGLISH
GRAMMAR
A FUNCTION-BASED INTRODUCTION
Volume I
T. GIVÓN
Linguistics Department
University of Oregon
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Givón, Talmy,
1936-English grammar : a function-based introduction / T. Givón. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and indexes. 1. English l a n g u a g e - G r a m m a r . I. Title. PE1106.G57 1993
428.2--dc20 93-18295 ISBN 1-55619-459-5 (set hb)/1-55619-466-8 (set pb) (US alk. paper) CIP
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© Copyright 1993 - T. Givón.
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Dwight Bolinger, generous teacher, thoughtful friend, lover of language.
Foreword xix
1. INTRODUCTION 1 1.1. Grammar and communication 1
1.1.1. Structure vs. function 1 1.1.2. Arbitrary vs. motivated rules of grammar 2
1.1.3. Rules of grammar vs. communicative strategies 3 1.1.4. Cross-language diversity of grammatical strategies 4
1.2. Whose grammar? 5
1.2.1. Prescriptive vs. descriptive grammars 5
1.2.2. Historic time 8 1.2.3. Age: The grammar of youth 9
1.2.4. Spoken vs. written language 13 1.2.5. Educated vs. uneducated grammar 15 1.2.6. Formal vs. informal grammar 17 1.2.7. Grammar and social status 17 1.2.8. Grammar and ethnic minorities 18
1.2.9. Geographical dialects 19 1.2.10. Grammar and foreign talk 19 1.2.11. Grammar and individual style 20
1.3. Grammar for communication 21
1.3.1. Major functions of language 21 1.3.2. Words, clauses, discourse 21 1.3.3. Grammar as a communicative code 25
1.3.3.1. Joint coding 25 1.3.3.2. Coding devices in syntax 26
1.4. Theme and variation in syntactic description 27
1.5. Parsing: tree diagrams 28 1.6. Deep structure, surface structure and meaning 30
2. VOCABULARY: WORDS AND MORPHEMES 41
2.1. Preliminaries 41
2.1.1. Recapitulation: Meaning, information and communication 41 2.1.2. The conceptual lexicon: Semantic features and semantic fields 43 2.1.3. Shared vocabulary: Meaning and cultural world-view 44
2.1.4. History of the English lexicon 45
2.2. Lexical vs. grammatical vocabulary 46
2.2.1. Lexical words 46 2.2.2. Grammatical morphemes 47
2.2.3. Derivational morphemes 47
2.3. The morphemic status of English vocabulary 50
2.4. Lexical word-classes 51
2.4.1. Membership criteria 51 2.4.2. Natural classes: Prototypicality and variability 52
2.4.3. Semantic overview 53 2.4.4. Nouns 55 2.4.4.1. Semantic characteristics 55 2.4.4.2. Syntactic behavior 57 2.4.4.3. Morphological characteristics 58 2.4.4.3.1. Grammatical morphology 59 2.4.4.3.2. Derivational morphology 60 2.4.5. Adjectives 62 2.4.5.1. Semantic characteristics 62 2.4.5.1.1. Prototypical adjectives 62 2.4.5.1.2. Less prototypical adjectives 63
2.4.5.1.3. Derived adjectives 64 2.4.5.1.4. Polarity of antonymic pairs 64
2.4.5.2. Syntactic behavior 65 2.4.5.3. Morphological characteristics 66 2.4.5.3.1. Grammatical morphology 66 2.4.5.3.2. Derivational morphology 67 2.4.6. Verbs 68 2.4.6.1. Semantic characterization 68 2.4.6.2. Syntactic characterization 68 2.4.6.3. Morphological characterization 68 2.4.6.3.1. Grammatical morphology 68 2.4.6.3.2. Derivational morphology 70
2.4.7. Adverbs 71 2.4.7.1. Preamble 71
2.4.7.2. Manner adverbs 71 2.4.7.3. Time, frequency or aspectuality adverbs 73
2.4.7.4. Epistemic adverbs 74 2.4.7.5. Evaluative adverbs 75 2.4.7.6. Adverbs modifying adjectives 76
2.4.7.7. Emphatic adverbs 77
2.5. Minor word classes 77
2.5.1. Preamble 77 2.5.2. Prepositions 77 2.5.3. Inter-clausal connectives 78 2.5.3.1. Conjunctions 77 2.5.3.2. Subordinators 78 2.5.4. Pronouns 79 2.5.5. Determiners 80 2.5.5.1. Articles 80 2.5.5.2. Demonstratives 80 2.5.5.3. Possessor pronouns 81 2.5.6. Quantifiers 81 2.5.7. Numerals 81 2.5.8. Ordinals 81 2.5.9. Auxiliaries 81 2.5.10. Interjections 81 Notes 84 3. SIMPLE VERBAL CLAUSES 89
3.1. Preliminaries 89
3.1.1. Scope 89 3.1.2. States, events, and actions 90
3.1.3. Semantic roles 90 3.1.4. Grammatical roles 92
3.1.4.1. Overview 92 3.1.4.2. The grammatical subject 94
3.1.4.3. The grammatical (direct) object 95
3.1.4.4. The indirect object 95 3.1.4.5. Nominal predicate 95 3.1.5. Basic word-order of English 96
3.2. Parsing and tree diagrams: Recapitulation 96 3.3. Classification of verbs and simple clauses 99
3.3.1. Transitivity 99 3.3.1.1. Semantic definition 99
3.3.1.2. Syntactic definition 100 3.3.2. Dummy-subject verbs 100
3.3.3. Copular verbs 101 3.3.3.1. The stative copula 'be' 101
3.3.3.2. The process copula 'get' 103
3.3.3.3. The process copula 'become' 103 3.3.3.4. The stative copulas 'seem' and 'appear' 104
3.3.3.5. The process copula 'turn (into)' 104
3.3.4. Simple intransitive verbs 105
3.3.5. Transitive verbs 106 3.3.5.1. Prototypical transitive verbs 106
3.3.5.2. Less prototypical transitive verbs 108
3.3.5.2.1. Preamble 108 3.3.5.2.2. Dative subjects 109 3.3.5.2.3. Dative objects 110 3.3.5.2.4. Patient-subject as cause 110 3.3.5.2.5. Instrument as patient-subject 111 3.3.5.2.6. Locative direct-objects 112 3.3.5.2.7. Cognate objects 112 3.3.5.2.8. Incorporated patients 114 3.3.5.2.9. Associative direct objects 115 3.3.5.2.10. Transitive verbs of possession 115 3.3.5.3. Transitivity and unspecified objects 115 3.3.6. Intransitive verbs with an indirect object 116
3.3.6.1. The prototype: Verbs with a locative indirect-object 117
3.3.6.2. Verbs with dative or patient indirect-object 118 3.3.6.3. Reciprocal verbs with an associative indirect-object 119
3.3.7. Bi-transitive verbs 120 3.3.7.1. Preamble 120 3.3.7.2. The bi-transitive prototype: Locative indirect
object 120 3.3.7.3. Dative-Benefactive indirect object 121
3.3.7.4. The instrumental-locative alternation 122
3.3.7.6. Extending the verbal frame with optional indirect
objects 124 3.3.7.7. Verbs with two direct objects 125
3.3.8. Verbs with verbal complements 127
3.3.8.1. Preamble 127 3.3.8.2. Verbs with clausal subjects 127
3.3.8.3. Modality verbs 129 3.3.8.4. Manipulative verbs 132 3.3.8.5. Perception-cognition-utterance (PCU) verbs 133
3.3.8.6. Information verbs 136
3.4. Multiple membership in verb classes 137 3.5. Verbs that incorporate prepositions 138 3.6. Summary of the structure of simple clauses 142
Notes 144 4. VERBAL INFLECTIONS: TENSE, ASPECT, MODALITY
AND NEGATION 147 4.1. Introduction 147 4.2. Tense 148 4.2.1. Preliminaries 148 4.2.2. Past 148 4.2.3. Future 149 4.2.4. Present 150 4.2.5. Habitual 152 4.3. Aspect 152 4.3.1. Preliminaries 152 4.3.2. The progressive 153 4.3.2.1. Unboundedness (vs. compactness) 153 4.3.2.2. Proximity (vs. remoteness) 154 4.3.2.3. Simultaneity (vs. sequentiality) 155 4.3.2.4. The habitual progressive 157 4.3.3. Other progressive aspectuals 158
4.3.3.1. Continuous-repetitive aspectuals 158 4.3.3.2. Inceptive-progressive aspectuals 159 4.3.3.3. Terminative-progressive aspectuals 160
4.3.4. The habitual past 161 4.3.5. The perfect 161 4.3.5.1. Preliminaries 161 4.3.5.2. Anteriority 162 4.3.5.3. Perfectivity 163 4.3.5.4. Counter-sequentiality 163 4.3.5.5. Relevance 164 4.3.6. The immediate aspect 166
4.4. Modality 169
4.4.1. Propositional modalities 169 4.4.2. Epistemic modalities 169 4.4.3. The grammatical distribution of modality 170
4.4.3.1. Tense-aspect 171 4.4.3.2. Irrealis-inducing adverbs 171
4.4.3.3. Modals and irrealis 172 4.4.3.4. Irrealis in verb complements 176
4.4.3.5. Irrealis and non-declarative speech-acts 176 4.4.3.6. Grammatical environments associated with presup
position 177
4.5. Communicative and cognitive aspects of
tense-aspect-modality 178
4.5.1. Markedness 178 4.5.2. Frequency distribution in text 179
4.5.3. Cognitive considerations 180 4.5.3.1. Modality 180 4.5.3.2. Perfectivity 180 4.5.3.3. Sequentiality 181 4.5.3.4. Relevance 181
4.6. The syntax of tense-aspect-modality 182
4.6.1. Combinations and ordering rules 182 4.6.2. Some recent developments in the grammar of
tense-aspect-modality 185
4.7. Negation 187
4.7.1. Negation and logic 187 4.7.2. Negation and the strength of assertion 188
4.7.3. Negation and presupposition 188 4.7.4. Negation as a speech-act 190
4.7.5. Negation in discourse 190 4.7.5.1. Preamble: Change vs. stasis 190
4.7.5.2. The ontology of negative events 191
4.7.6. Negation and social interaction 193 4.7.7. Presupposition and the scope of negation 195
4.7.8. The morpho-syntax of English negation 199 4.7.9. Further topics in the syntax of negation 201
4.7.9.1. Negation in main vs. complement clauses 201 4.7.9.2. Syntactic, morphological and inherent negation 202 4.7.9.3. Negative polarity and levels of negation 203 4.7.9.4. Constituent negation and emphatic denial 204
Notes 209 5. REFERENCE AND DEFINITENESS 213
5.1. Introduction 213 5.2. Reference 213
5.2.1. Existence vs. reference 213 5.2.2. Referential intent 215 5.2.3. Reference and propositional modalities 216
5.2.4. The indefinite determiners 'any', 'no' and 'some' 219
5.2.4.1. The non-referring article 'any' 219 5.2.4.2. The non-referring article 'no' 220
5.2.4.3. The indefinite article 'some' 220 5.2.4.4. 'Any', 'no' and 'some' as pronouns 222 5.2.5. Reference under the scope of negation 224 5.2.6. Gradation of indefinite reference 224
5.2.7. Plurality and reference 225 5.2.8. Pragmatic effects on possible reference 226
5.2.9. The non-referring use of anaphoric pronouns 228 5.2.9.1. Gender and non-referring and pronouns 228 5.2.9.2. Semantic reference vs. specific individuation 229 5.2.9.3. The pronoun 'one' in definite expressions 230 5.2.10. Semantic reference vs. pragmatic importance 230
5.3. Definiteness 232 5.3.1. Definite reference and the communicative contract 232
5.3.2. Grounds for referential accessibility 232 5.3.3. Situation-based ('deictic') definîtes 232
5.3.4. Culturally-based definites 233 5.3.5. Text-based ('anaphoric') definites 235
5.3.5.1. Zero anaphora, anaphoric pronouns, and definite
NPs 235 5.3.5.2. Stressed vs. unstressed pronouns 235
5.3.5.3. Demonstratives and text-based definite reference 238
5.3.5.4. Names and text-based definite reference 240
5.4. Generic subjects, defíniteness and reference 242 5.5. Defíniteness, reference and text processing: A cognitive
overview 244
Notes 246 6. NOUN PHRASES 247
6.1. Nouns and modifiers 247 6.2. Ordering of elements within the noun phrase 248
6.2.1. Preliminaries 248 6.2.2. Pre-nominal modifiers 249
6.2.2.1. Quantifiers 249 6.2.2.1.1. Partitive definite quantifiers 249
6.2.2.1.2. Indefinite quantifiers-determiners 250
6.2.2.1.3. Quantifier scope 251 6.2.2.1.3.1. Quantifier scope within the clause 251
6.2.2.1.3.2. Quantifier scope within the noun
phrase 254 6.2.2.1.3.3. The scope of 'only' in the written
register 254
6.2.2.2. Determiners 255 6.2.2.3. Adjectives 256 6.2.2.4. Compounding: Nouns as modifiers 258
6.2.2.5. Adverbs within the Adjectival Phrase 261
6.2.3. Post-nominal modifiers 262 6.2.3.1. Relative clauses 263 6.2.3.2. Noun complements 263 6.2.3.3. Possessive phrases 264 6.2.3.4. Pseudo-possessives: Complex locatives 264
6.4. Modifiers used as anaphoric pronouns 269
6.5. Scattered noun phrases 270 6.6. Complex noun phrases 271
6.6.1. Modifying adjectives and their 'semantic source' 272
6.6.2. Conjoined noun phrases 273 6.6.2.1. Joint participation in a single event 273
6.6.2.2. The relative order of conjoined NPs 275 6.6.2.3. The morphological unification of conjoined NPs 277
6.6.2.3.1. Case-role integration 277 6.6.2.3.2. Determiner integration 279 6.6.2.3.3. Number integration 282 6.6.2.3.4. Adjective integration 283 6.6.2.4. Multiple conjunction, disjunction and event
integration 284 6.6.2.5. Plurality, verb agreement and group nouns 286
6.6.3. Complex NPs arising through nominalization 287
6.6.3.1. Preamble 287 6.6.3.2. The finite-clause prototype 288
6.6.3.3. From the finite toward the non-finite prototype 288
6.6.3.4. From verbal to nominal morphology 289 6.6.3.5. Subject and object case-marking 291 6.6.3.6. Indirect objects in nominalized clauses 293 6.6.3.7. Determiners in nominalized clauses 294 6.6.3.8. Adverbs as adjectives in nominalized clauses 295
6.6.4. Noun complements 298
Notes 300 Bibliography 303 Index 311
"...All great music contains two ingredients — expression and form..."
R. Goode concert pianist*
Grammar is everybody's business. It is the proverbial broth tended to by a plethora of jealous cooks, a foundling with hosts of would-be keepers. It is also the rock upon which generations of perfectly fluent, manifestly intelli gent native speakers have crashed, again and again. Of grammar's many self-appointed guardians, my own profession may claim special credit for our present predicament of profound grammatical illiteracy. It is the lin guists who came up with the myth of formal structure: Grammar as an arbi trary, autonomous mechanism whose prime function was to govern the con struction of well-formed sentences. Grammar that was about grammar. The logical consequence of this pernicious nonsense is, of course, that grammar is not about communication. Whether it exists or not, grammar can be safely ignored, bypassed, so that one may proceed directly to the heart of the matter — rhetoric, communication.
As often as not, common sense rests somewhere in the middle. The middle grounds that inspired this book is that yes, grammar does exist; and yes, it does have rules; and perish the thought, those rules really matter and can be taught explicitly. But no, grammar is not about grammar; and no again, grammar is not arbitrary, it is there for a reason. Grammar is our path to concise, coherent expression. In grammar as in music, good expres sion rides on good form. Metaphorically and literally, grammar — as musi cal form — must make sense.
This book is intended for both students and teachers, at both the high-school and college level, for both native and non-native speakers. With the guidance of a teacher, it can serve as the student's introduction to the gram mar of (written) English. Put another way, it is an introduction to grammar as a means for producing coherent text. Like all introductions, it is selective and incomplete. The grammar of any language is a huge living organism, it cannot be exhaustively described in ten lifetimes. One has to tease apart the more systematic core from the still-evolving and sometime chaotic periphery. And one can only hope then that this introduction to the core will stimulate the reader to seek the outer reaches.
Aiming this book at the teaching of English Grammar to both native and non-native speakers is a deliberate move. In spite of striking differ ences in prior linguistic background, the native and non-native speaker face a similar task in acquiring written, literate English: neither can claim writ ten English as their native language. To the native speaker it is his/her first second language, a language whose grammar is starkly different from that of the spoken language learned first at home. Much like the transition from spoken sounds to a written alphabet, the transition from spoken to written grammar is a profound transformation. It jars the mind's old habits and demands conscious reflection upon the nature of two conflicting sets of skills. The first, face-to-face oral communication, is a native skill supported by half a million years of bio-cultural evolution. The second, written expression, is an acquired skill of a relatively recent vintage. By acquiring a written language we become bilingual; and bilingualism demands careful discrimination between the two contexts that go with the two sets of skills.
In the course of learning, the non-native speaker indeed produces "er rors". The native speaker, on the other hand, produces only "inappropriate contextual choices". Still, in the course of both types of learning, the goal of deliberate instruction is not to eradicate all vestiges of older linguistic habits. Wise grammar instruction teaches, in both instances, a new set of communicative skills, segregating them carefully from the older, native skills. The student is then left with two sets of linguistic behaviors. Both are useful, both are valid, but they apply in mutually exclusive contexts.
The approach to descriptive grammar I have pursued here owes much to many illustrious antecedents, beginning with the late Otto Jespersen. It owes much to many who are still with us, such as Michael Halliday and Bob Longacre. And it owes even more to many of my own contemporaries and close associates, such as Wally Chafe, Bernard Comrie, Bob Dixon, John
Haiman, Paul Hopper, Ron Langacker, Gillian Sankoff, Dan Slobin and Sandy Thompson. The list of people I've been fortunate to learn from is much too long to recite here in its entirety; but special gratitude is due to John Haiman for reading doggedly through the entire manuscript and criticizing it unsparingly. Te absolvo, Janos.
In all fairness, I must also acknowledge my great indebtedness to a man whose approach to grammar I have rejected long ago, Noam Chomsky. However far apart our paths may have meandered, his presence loomed large over my early awakening to the undeniable mental reality of grammar, and to the fact that in language — as in music — form really mat tered.
My guardian angel in the study of grammar has always been Dwight Bolinger, to whose memory this book is dedicated. Dwight's great acuity, critical reflection, profound scholarship, penetrating insight, inimitable light touch, and above all his all-consuming love for language and grammar, have been an inspiration to me, a beacon whose shining light I only hope to dimly reflect. In his early, steadfast and often lonely insistence that form must be studied together with meaning, that grammar made sense, and that the forms of language were about the expression of thought, Dwight was the most generous teacher and thoughtful critic a young upstart could possi bly hope to find. The many faults that are still evident in this book would have perhaps been fewer if Dwight had been able, as was his original intent, to read through the manuscript. Like many of my generation, I have been orphaned. I hope some day to be worthy of Dwight's faith.
Eugene, Oregon June, 1992
1.1. GRAMMAR AND COMMUNICATION
"...Let them distinguish the proper sense by colons and commas, and let them see the points each one in its due place, and let not him who reads the words to them either read falsely or pause suddenly..."
(attributed to the 8th Century English monk Alcuin, on behalf of Charlemagne)
1.1.1. Structure vs. function
The perspective from which this book is written is unabashedly func tional. Perhaps the best way of saying what grammar is from a functional perspective is to say first what grammar is not. Grammar is not a set of rigid rules that must be followed in order to produce grammatical sentences. Rather, grammar is a set of strategies that one employs in order to produce
coherent communication.
Nothing in this formulation should be taken as a denial of the existence of rules of grammar. Rather, it simply suggests that rules of grammar — taken as a whole — are not arbitrary; they are not there just for the heck of it. The production of rule-governed grammatical sentences is the means by which one produces coherent communication.
Grammarians use two extreme analogies to bring across their concep tion of rules of grammar. One common analogy is taken from, essentially, Newtonian Physics; it likens a grammar to an idealized logic machine that abides by exceptionless, law-like rules. The machine and its various parts operate in a way that is consistent and 100% rule-governed, regardless of what function the entire machine or its various parts perform. The function of the machine and its parts is another topic, to be investigated separately at some other time. The function has relatively little to do with the structure
of the machine, or how the structure came to be what it is. When one teaches grammar, therefore, one can safely ignore its function, and make reference only to parts of the grammar machine.
One can indeed describe real machines in such a way, ones that have been constructed for a purpose, say a car. The fact that the power-train is designed to make the wheels spin, that the transmission modulates the tor que while transmitting power to the wheels, that the wheels spin to move the car, and that the whole car is designed for transportation, are irrelevant from such a perspective.
An altogether different analogy for grammar is that of a biological
organism. Within the organism, various anatomical structures perform dis
tinct physiological functions. The structural design is adapted through pro tracted evolution to perform specific functions. In biology, the study of structure would be meaningless without the parallel study of function. This has been an implicit tenet of biological scholarship ever since Aristotle, the founder of biology, who first proposed to view the design of organisms by analogy with purposeful tools:
"...If a piece of wood is to be split with an axe, the axe must of necessity be hard; and if hard, it must of necessity be made of iron or bronze. Now exactly in the same way the body, which like the axe is an instrument— for both the body as a whole and its several parts individually have definite operations for which they are made; just in the same way, I say, the body if it is to do its work, must of necessity be of such and such character..."
("De Partibus Animalium", in McKeon, ed., 1941:647) The same perspective may be found in a recent standard text on human anatomy:
"...Anatomy is the science that deals with the structure of the body...physiology is defined as the science of function. Anatomy and physiology have more meaning when studied together..."
(Crouch, Functional Human Anatomy, 1978, pp. 9-10) And it is the same perspective adopted in this book, one of assuming that human language is a purposeful instrument designed to code and communi cate information, and that like other instruments, its structure is not divorced from its function.
1.1.2. Arbitrary vs. motivated rules of grammar
By saying that rules of grammar are not arbitrary, one need not ignore the fact that occasionally a rule — in a particular language at a particular
time — indeed turns out to be arbitrary. That is, the rule seems com
municatively opaque, non-functional; it does not make sense. Situations of
this type are almost always due to the cumulative effect of historical change: An erstwhile communicatively transparent rule of grammar has, due to the conflation of several historical changes over time, become bizarre, fossilized, counter-communicative. Such cases indeed exist, but they constitute a minority of the bulk of the extant rules of a grammar at any given time.1
Here again, a biological analogy is instructive. In the anatomy of every organism one finds a certain proportion of vestigial organs that have lost their function altogether. In other instances, organs undergo functional re
assignment, over time losing their original function but gaining a new one.
When this re-assignment is relatively recent, the structural design of an organ may reflect more naturally its original function than its current func tion.2 In almost all cases, such a mismatch between structure and function
is due to multi-step evolution. Evolutionary change in biological design is the analog of historical change in linguistic structure.
A good example of communicatively opaque rules of grammar in Eng lish are nouns with irregular plurals and verbs with irregular past tense forms. Both reflect the tail end of massive re-analysis in the grammar of a Germanic language. In the course of this re-analysis, previously coherent rules have deteriorated over time and have become largely incoherent. They are being gradually eliminated from the grammar; and it is perhaps a matter of time before they have disappeared altogether.3
1.1.3. Rules of grammar vs. communicative strategies
The laws of Newtonian physics are considered exceptionless. Often, rules of grammar seem equally rigid, so much so that the unwary may be tempted to view them as the workings of a deterministic automaton. On closer analysis, many — perhaps the bulk of— the rules in a grammar turn out to be considerably more flexible. Their flexibility may be understood in several senses. First, the range of contexts to which a rule applies is not a rigidly defined population. Rather, the bulk of the cases — the run-of-the-mill typical instances — either clearly abide or clearly do not abide by the rule. But a significant if small minority of cases also exists, who fall some where in the middle. That is, the application or non-application of the rule in such cases is a matter of more subtle judgement and — most important — is often a matter of degree. In such cases, a more detailed examination
of the communicative context is required, before the applicability of a rule can be decided with any degree of certainty.
As a unique, human-specific device for coding and communicating information, grammar may be viewed as the strategy that takes care, in a relatively fast and governed fashion, of the bulk of cases. This rule-bound strategy, however, leaves a significant minority of cases to be process ed by more deliberate, time-consuming, analytic means.
There is, here again, a transparent biological analogy to the division between processing the bulk of more typical cases vs. processing a minority of more subtle borderline cases. In biological information processing, older, lower-level analysis of perceptual input is fully automated, it is per formed at high speed and low error-rate. It is also more likely to be geneti cally pre-wired, or what biologists call a closed behavioral program.4 In
contrast, more complex, higher-order, more recently-developed skills are first performed in a slower, conscious, attended fashion. Through acquisi tion and habituation, these complex higher-order skills — such as playing musical instruments, singing, typing, dancing or riding a bicycle — can and do become automated over time. But their automation takes place during one's life-time, and is heavily dependent on practice.5 In biological terms,
the acquisition of such skills depends on an open behavioral program. While the learning of a human grammar clearly depends upon many pre-wired closed neural programs, the acquisition of the grammar of a
particular language is clearly a skill of the second type. It is acquired
post-natally, via repeated trial-and-error communicative interaction. Once acquired, it is indeed a highly automated, in-wired skill. But even then, grammar continues to display certain margins of context-dependent, con scious analysis.
1.1.4. Cross-language diversity of grammatical strategies
By insisting that rules of grammar are not arbitrary, one does not wish to imply that there is only one human-universal way of grammatically cod ing any particular communicative function. The study of grammatical diver sity across languages certainly suggests otherwise. And this diversity is one of the reasons why we consider the acquisition of grammar to be, at least in part, an open behavioral program. Still, there are only a limited number of
grammatical strategies that human languages actually use to code the same
communicative functions. The observed cross-language diversity of gram mars is neither unlimited nor capricious; rather, it is highly constrained. A
particular grammatical strategy adopted by a language in one functional
domain is often due to the accidental conflation of various historical changes. But in part it is also due to the strategies used by the language in other — functionally related — domains.
To illustrate the partially accidental nature of the historical connection, consider the use of the relative pronouns 'who', 'whom', 'which', 'where' and 'when' in the grammar of relative clauses in English. It is not indepen dent of their earlier use as interrogative pronouns in the grammar of WH-questions. Similarly, the use of the subordinator 'that' in both relative clauses and verb complements is not independent of its earlier use as a
demonstrative pronoun. And the use of the adverbial subordinator 'since' to
render the logical meaning 'because' is not independent of its earlier tem poral sense ('from the time').
The fact is then that some communicative functions seem to borrow grammatical coding-devices from neighboring (related) functions. This bor rowing phenomenon again has close analogs in biological evolution, where old organs are often adapted to new functions. The grammar of a language may thus itself be viewed as a biological organism. Within that organism, the various grammar-coded functions — organs — are inter-connected in many ways and to varying degrees. Some inter-connections are stronger and more direct; others are weaker or more circuitous. A rule of a grammar — like an organ of the body — cannot be fully understood unless its interaction with other rules is also understood.
One may note, finally, that the biological analogy for language is not particularly new. The words of Franz Bopp, an early 19th century linguist, express the same attitude, albeit with a certain pre-Darwinian naivete:6
"...Languages are to be considered organic natural bodies, which are formed according to fixed laws, develop as possessing an inner principle of life, and gradually die out because they do not understand themselves any longer, and therefore cast off or mutilate their members or forms..."
1.2. WHOSE GRAMMAR?
1.2.1. Prescriptive vs. descriptive grammars
The sense of 'grammar' most readers are likely to be familiar with is that of prescriptive grammar: This usage is right, that one is wrong. The teaching of "language arts" in our primary and secondary schools, as well as the popular press, have combined to reinforce this view. In this regard, it
seems, everybody with a sharp pen and strong opinions is a rightful, wrath ful expert. For example, a well-known columnist has been fulminating with equal venom against the following lapses of English grammar:7
(1) a. "...In order for your child to receive credit for this assign ment, they must turn in a signed copy..."
b. "...Sally, he said, good grammar never made me no dol lars..."
c. "...whom beats who in the Seattle Kingdome this weekend..."
d. "...Twenty years of teaching taught my husband and I the value of field trips..."
e. "...coverage of Monday night football has not been discussed between Dennis and /..."
f. "...he's a lot older than her, but so what?..."
Example (la) is an entrenched creative innovation in the spoken language, adapting the third person plural 'they' to a new use as a gender-neutral pro noun.8 Example (lb) is correct for the spoken, informal English of perhaps
75% of Americans. Example (1c) represents hyper-correction by speakers for whom the form 'whom' has ceased to exist, and 'who' is used to mark both subject and object (again probably the vast majority of American speakers). Examples (ld,e) represent the current fluctuation of the rule about subject vs. object pronoun form following the conjunction 'and'. And example (1f) represents the largely finished re-analysis of a similar case, in the speech of all but a recalcitrant minority of older speakers.
The same columnist, in a saner mood, points out to where rules of grammar are really useful, namely in insuring coherent communication. The usages he pans this time are indeed disruptive:9
(2) a. "...Lawyer accused of lying to fly..."
b. "...He discovered the identity of an Evanston girl who killed herself before the newspapers regular reporter could..." "...He is a former Mt. Vernon native..."
d. "...more attention should be paid to hazing by university offi cials..."
e. "...bar ministers who have committed sex offenses from the pulpit for a year..."
f. "...He plans to teach a course this fall... on the mysterious civilization at Indian Community College..."
And the very same columnist is positively permissive about the infamous
split infinitive:10
(3) ''...The proper formation, she insists, was "to go quickly" or "quickly to go", but under no circumstances could one write "to quickly go". This is pure baloney, of course, but it is baloney with a remarkable shelf life..."
The sense of 'grammar' used in this book is unabashedly that of
descriptive grammar. The grammar of current American English is
described just like the grammar of any other language. Like all languages, however — especially those that serve large, complex societies — 'Ameri can English' is in a way a convenient fiction. Rather than consisting of a single speech community with a single grammar, American English is a complex multi-layered speech community with an immense array of gram mars. These grammars indeed partially overlap and are historically inter related. But their diversity is manifest to anybody with a discerning ear. It is then left to the descriptive grammarian to make choices within this diver sity, and then defend them, and hopefully convince the reader that they are well motivated.
The dimensions along which grammars most commonly vary are: (a) History: Older/obsolete vs. newer/current usage
(b) Age: Older vs. younger speakers (c) Medium: Written vs. spoken language
(d) Education: Educated vs. uneducated speakers (e) Formality: Formal vs. informal style
(f) Social class: High-status vs. low-status speakers (g) Ethnicity: Majority vs. minority sub-cultures (h) Geography: Regional, urban vs. rural dialects (i) Native skill: Native vs. non-native speakers (j) Individual: This individual or family vs. that one
These dimensions are not totally independent of each other. Rather, they show predictable tendencies to co-vary. Thus, for example, written lan guage (c) tends to be associated more strongly with older usage (a), older speakers (b), educated speakers (d), formal usage (e), higher social status (f) and urban dialects (h). But these associations are not absolute. In the following sections we will survey each dimension briefly.
1.2.2. Historic time
As noted above, 'The Grammar' of a language is probably a conve nient fiction, disguising a wide range of diversity. In the same way, the cur
rent steady state of the grammar (or of 'The Language') is an equally con
venient fiction. Much of the diversity that one encounters in 'The Gram mar' at its 'current steady state' is due to the fact that language and gram mar are forever on the move. Individual speakers constantly innovate and reshape their usage along three major dimensions:
(a) Simplification toward greater code-transparency (b) Elaboration toward greater expressive power
(c) Truncation and chopping toward greater processing economy As illustration of how profound this change could be, consider the fol lowing three versions of The Lord's Prayer, one from Old English (ca. 900 AD), the other from Middle English (ca. 1350 AD), the last from Modern English (ca. 1700):11
(4) a. Old English (ca. 1000 AD)
Faeder ure þu þe aert on heofonum, si þin nama gehalgod;
to become þin rice, gewurþe ðin willa rþn swa swa on heofonum;
urne gedaelighwamlican hlaf syle us to daeg; ond forgyf us ure gyltas,
swa swa we forgyfa þurum gyltendum; ond ne gelaed þu us on constunge, acþalys us of yfele soþlice. Amen. b. Middle English (ca. 1395 AD)
Oure fadir that art in heuenes, halwid be thi name;
thi kyngdoom come to, be thi wille don in erthe as in heuen;
gyue tu vs this dai oure breed ouer othir substaunce; and forgyue to vs oure dettis,
as we forgyuen to oure dettouris; and lede vs not in to temptacioun, but deliuere vs fro yuel. Amen.
. Modern English (ca. 1700)
Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name;
Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil. Amen.
Since change — in pronunciation, word-meaning and grammar — is forever ongoing, older historical traits always coexist with newer innova tions at any point in the life of a language. True, the descriptive gramma rian is bound to describe the language as it is at a particular time. But it often makes more sense to interpret today's grammar as the cumulative product of historical change, and as the current incubator of future change. Put another way, in describing the synchronic grammar, one must remain mindful of its profoundly diachronic underpinnings.
1.2.3. Age: The grammar of youth
Each new generation of mother-tongue learners display an intensive activity of linguistic innovation, as they re-interpret the grammar used by their parent generation. Quite often, tomorrow's grammar can be antici pated from the speech of today's young. The grammatical innovations of the young are not mere 'corruptions', 'errors' or 'failure to learn correctly'. More often than not, they are spontaneous attempts to make sense of a baffling complexity and numerous inconsistencies; to creatively extend adult grammar; to re-interpret the adult linguistic input as a more coherent communicative code. To illustrate briefly the unique nature of the gram matical inventiveness of children, consider the following examples of child grammar of English, produced roughly from the age of three years and onward. In this case, we deal with innovations that eventually fell by the wayside:
(5) Clause-initial negation:12
a. no the sun shining ( T h e sun is not shining') b. no Fraser read it
(6) Order of pronouns :13
Give me it ('Give it to me')
(7) Nominal relative clauses:14
a. This is my did it (This is what I did') b. Look-a my made
('Look at what I made') (8) Simplified WH-questions:15
a. What do wheel?
('What does the wheel do?') b. Where went the wheel?
('Where did the wheel go?') Where it is?
('Where is it?') (9) Deictic articles:16
a. in there wheels ('In the wheels there') b. go in there train
('Go in the train there') (10) Unmarked causati ves: 17
a. I'm gonna sharp this pencil ( T m gonna sharpen the pencil') b. Go me to the bathroom
{'Take me to the bathroom')
come it closer ('Bring it closer') d. Can you stay this open
('Can you leave it open?) e. Don't dead him
('Don't kill him')
Often, innovations introduced by the young are castigated by older speakers as aberrations to be shunned, rank corruption, the ultimate demise of the real language. Jeremiads about the decline and fall of human language may go back all the way to antiquity. A relatively late example of the Decline and Fall school of thought can be found in Dr. Samuel Johnson's Preface to his Dictionary:18
"...Tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degenera tion..."
A similar if more parochial dismay has been expressed by the popular 19th century linguist Max Müller:19
"...on the whole, the history of all the Aryan languages is nothing but a gradual process of decay..."
The lamentations have been so persistent that one wonders how we have still wound up, rather mysteriously, with a functioning instrument of com munication. Here again the descriptive linguist must make choices and often second-guess — rightly or wrongly — the future drift of the population mean. Should one, for example, rant and rave about the corrupt usage in (11a) below, and insist on only (11b)? Or should one notice the prevalent — and communicatively useful — meaning distinction:
(11) a. I feel good. ( > mood-wise) b. I feel well. ( > health-wise)
Should one insist on the sanctioned (12a), or acknowledge the prevalent — and unimpeachably useful — alternative (12b):
(12) a. If you see anybody there, tell him to... b. If you see anybody there, tell them to...
Should one insist on the cumbersome (13a), rather than acknowledge the graceful and more current (13b):
(13) a. The man to whom I showed this... b. The man I showed this to...
Should one acknowledge or reject the perfectly interpretable relative clauses, all staples of the spoken register, such as:
(14) a. ...these faces that you don't know who they are... b. ...the woman that I told you about her brother... ...the woman that I know the man who loved her... d. ...that guy that I was dating his daughter...
Innovative usage by young native speakers is often acknowledged in genre-sensitive written fiction. The following passage, for example, comes from a short story in The New Yorker:20
(15) "...There's this policeman and his name is Bradley and every night there's this thief going around swiping one wheel from everybody's bicycle. Bradley's partner's name is Fred that this thief swipes one wheel from his bicycle. His daughter is Tracey. Fred has a police dog that he
makes him sniff all the bicycles..."
One should note, however, that we deal here not with absolutes — extreme resistance to change vs. total permissiveness — but rather with relative judgements, involving the delicate balance between two opposing forces. On the one hand, grammatical change is an unavoidable, spontane ously occurring phenomenon. Speakers, both young and old, will continue doing it as a matter of course. It is a subconscious part of being a live, intel ligent, communicating user of grammar. On the other hand, a community that allows excessive diversity in its communicative (and cultural) code will sooner or later reach the point of total disruption of both its communication and culture. Somewhere near that point, the sense of "being the same speech community" and "sharing the same cultural world-view" will have dissipated beyond residual utility. Therefore, the conservative forces that the adult power structure exercises against excessive linguistic diversity, via traditional social networks or through schools and literacy, indeed perform a legitimate, necessary social function.
The delicate balance between uniformity and diversity in a speech community again finds it close analog in biology, in the balance between genetic uniformity and genetic diversity within populations. In this regard, Bonner (1988) makes the following, profoundly pragmatic, observation:
"...There will be a constant selection pressure for increased variation, for it is only by producing variants that organisms can successfully perpetuate themselves. But too much variation will be selected against, because new, successful variants will be lost [to the gene pool, becoming incompatible with it] by excessive change....The significance of isolation... is that with out [it] the mechanism for producing a controlled amount of variation would be impossible; every gain in any competitive advantage [due to a new variant] would be lost by immediate hybridization if there were no isolating mechanism to prevent a mixing back of the genes which have suc cessfully come to differ [from the bulk of the population]..." (Bonner, 1988, pp. 231, 239; emphases and parentheses added)
The choice between permissive and innovative grammar need not always be made. Often, the descriptive linguist might serve his audience
better by presenting several co-existing variant uses, and then explain their relatedness. Then the linguist may even venture a prediction about which way the grammar might be drifting.
1.2.4. Spoken vs. written language
The grammar of a written language is profoundly different from that of the spoken language. The differences are often sharp and absolute, given the constant grammatical innovation that goes on in the spoken language. But even when not absolute, the differences between oral and written grammar can be striking in terms of frequency distribution. Complex, hierarchic syntactic constructions are systematically shunned in relaxed, informal, colloquial face-to-face communication. Short, conjoined, 'flat' structures are preferred. And the availability of the interlocutor, with eye-contact, instant feedback, corrections, assents and mutually-negotiated
coherence, has a profound effect on the grammatical structure of the spo
ken language.21
The two main registers controlled by educated speakers — the infor mal-colloquial and the formal-written — are equally useful and equally valid. The tradition of denigrating the child's native oral register as 'bad language', 'ungrammatical', 'uncouth' or 'careless' is indeed a destructive, misguided tradition. However, the two registers fit appropriately in mutu
ally exclusive contexts:
(a) Oral language is the instrument of face-to-face communication,
among familiars, in the relaxed, unhurried setting of home, fam ily, loved ones. It is appropriate for communicating within the
society of intimates.
(b) Written language is for more formal, impersonal, abstract com
munication elsewhere, in the more pressured setting of education and literacy-demanding jobs — within the society of strangers. The profound bilingualism that this dichotomy entails, for the literate speaker, is as pervasive as it is necessary. Each register, oral and written, serves a unique function that cannot be performed by the other.
As an example of typical spoken English, consider the following trans cript of a recorded personal narrative:22
(16) "...Well we, you could drill wells, we finally... got a good well, lots o' water and wonderful, good water...How deep? I think it was eighty-some feet deep, I believe...'course, that was οΓ slow cable-tube drillin' then...But anyway, we'll get into that part later...But we moved there...and my, my politician brother over here and ah, and another one and my cousin, οΓ Buster...and some neighbors that moved out there too, some other people... It was 'bout four-five families moved out there from this...together, yeah, Brownfield area...Well, we didn't move together but they did bring the stock. My dad had 'bout fifty head o' cows, and 'bout forty head o' horses and mules, and they spent all summer drivin' 'em out...Let's see, it must'a been at least seven hundred miles from Brownfield to that oI' homestead..."
In informal, intimate writing, nominally literate speakers 'write like they speak'. An example of such writing is:23
(17) "...Me i look for work i could do at home nothing yet. Babysitting I'll do once in a while as C. got sick for a month when i babysat boys that got sick after I started
J. works all the time to make up for my pay loves staying at home when he's off. I walk 4 miles a week for exercising...
...Last weekend in July C. actually started to walk with out holding on to something. Talks a few words baby talks i under stand her. She'll say hi there to people she knows she's shy around strangers. Daddy's girl can't go (J.) anywhere with out C. when he's home. Her rooms cute since we J. painted it yellow the color she picked and bears paper thats a trim..."
The new generation of a speech community, its young, are fluent native speakers of the spoken register by around 3 years of age. The scope and complexity of their native spoken grammar continues to expand up to school age and beyond. Once at school, they are introduced to the grammar
of their first second language — the written register. This is often done rather abruptly and under the less-than-intimate conditions of public educa tion.
Since the grammar of the written language is more extensive as well as more complex, and since to some extent the grammar of the oral register is a sub-set of written grammar, it is not an accident that descriptive gramma rians wind up describing primarily the grammar of the written register. But this understandable preference again must be tempered with recognizing the dynamic relationship between the two registers. The primacy, creative vigor and central role of the spoken language must be acknowledged. What also must be acknowledged is the fact that the more conservative grammar of the written register is constantly being replenished by innovations that arise mostly in the spoken register.
1.2.5. Educated vs. uneducated grammar
In the main, the division between educated and uneducated grammar closely parallels the division of written vs. spoken language, respectively. Educated speakers, however, tend to control a wider range of spoken genres, some of which approximate — in their formality and complexity — the grammar of the written register. While the descriptive grammarian is often bound to describe the grammar of educated speakers as, at some level, 'the norm', what was noted above about the primacy of the spoken language remains applicable here.
It is not uncommon for educated speakers or writers to abuse their 'upper' register. In their zeal for complexity and the right scholarly turn of phrase, such users often miss the point; namely that language, however complex or lofty its subject matter, is still an instrument of communication. As an illustration of extreme abuse of the scholarly jargon, consider:24
(18) "If the Roman government at the height of its power, and at the time when means of communication had been greatly improved, showed anxiety for the food supply of that Italy which was dominant in the Mediterranean world, it may be imagined that in the period preceding the great economic organization introduced by the Roman Principate the peoples of the Mediterranean region, peoples no one of which at the height of its power had controlled the visible food supply of the world so widely or so absolutely, had far graver cause for anxiety on the same
subject, an anxiety such as would be, under ordinary cir cumstances, the main factor, or, even under the most favorable circumstances possible in those ages, a main fac tor, in moulding the life of the individual and the policy of the state."
The jargonization of written, educated-sounding language may on occasion take a decidedly comic turn, with grammatical complexity under some control, but lexical meaning scattered to the four winds. The follow ing passage is perhaps a good illustration of such would-be-educated lan guage:25
(19) "FROM THE PRESIDENT
As it is with most things, time takes its toll and everything is affected by it. Some things appreciate over time...fine art, diamonds and gold, truth in expression. This is due in part to honest acceptance, love and appreciation of their mere existence. I believe this unadulterated attitude toward these material things can be transcended into hon orable organizations that colleagues are fundamentally attached to such as religion, political, fraternal and/or alumni.
The major adhesive factor in the appreciation of that which you are fundamentally attached to and appreciate is what stands the test of time; that which you covenant amongst peers conjures lasting power and value; that which is viewed as significant to personal and fraternal identification is generally protected from blatant disfigure ment derived from negligence or irresponsible compla cency. And in being a major or minor adhered component the rewards therefrom are inevitably equal.
Value is maintained, it is handed over to the fittest by recognized and accepted organizational process for con tinual maintenance and prosperity. The board actively invites enthusiastic alumni to provide assistance in the maintenance and prosperity of the University of Maryland Architecture Alumni Chapter..."
The non-standard grammar of less-educated speakers is amply rep resented in written fiction, when speech is quoted directly by
genre-sensi-tive writers. Thus, consider the following examples of subject relagenre-sensi-tive clauses missing their relative pronoun:26
(20) a. "...I been trying to get you, two days I been calling you. I figure you're shacked up with some broad filed
for divorce. Needs a little sympathy, huh?..." (p. 12)
b. "...I can't imagine the stockholder being too happy, splitting something he owns with a guy walks in off the
street..." (p. 31)
"...Virgil asked him whatever happened to Wendell Haines and Bobby said Wendell had died. Virgil said he heard something like that, but who was it shot
h i m l . . : " (p. 95)
1.2.6. Formal vs. informal grammar
In the main, more formal language tends to be strongly associated with the written register and educated speakers. In contrast, more informal lan guage tends to be associated with the spoken register and less-educated speakers. But the correlation is not absolute. First, even in a purely oral culture, some occasions call for a more formal speech-style, others for a more informal style. Second, within the written genre one can observe fine gradations of formality, with more intimate, personal writing often tilting toward the grammar of the informal spoken register. Formality of gram mar, in both registers, is a matter of degree; and then a matter of identify ing the socio-cultural context of the communication and making the appro priate choice of genre.
1.2.7. Grammar and social status
Much of the prejudice against oral, uneducated, informal grammar boils down to old and recalcitrant social realities. By and large, political and economic power, status and prestige have always been vested in the more educated — often minority — segment of the population. This was true when writing and education were the jealously guarded preserve of a priestly class that served the hereditary power structure, as in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, early China, old Canaan or pre-Columbian Mayan Mesoamerica. And it remains true today, with some obvious exceptions: The proportion of educated, literate people within the population is perhaps higher. But the facts of universal public education tend to obscure
some persistent social realities. The vast majority of native speakers of English in either North America or Britain still spend the bulk of their life within a largely oral culture; that is, within the culture of people who make their living primarily by the use of their hands, rather than exclusively by the use of their brain.
Among the educated elite, there is a tendency to look down on the lan guage of the less educated, the rural folks, the hicks in the sticks, the hard-hats, the rednecks. This social prejudice is perhaps the true foundation of pejorative attitudes toward the grammar of spoken, informal, everyday lan guage.
1.2.8. Grammar and ethnic minorities
Since ethnic minorities, in both North America and Britain, tend to occupy the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder, the extension of social prejudice to the grammatical usage of ethnic minorities is only natu ral. Self-appointed guardians of 'The Language' often single out the spoken grammar of minority speakers as the quintessential example of decline-and-fall. Whether the association is made consciously or subconsciously is of course a matter of conjecture. As an example of this prejudice, consider the list of deadly sins of grammar touted by one guardian of our linguistic pur ity, Edward Koch, formerly mayor or New York City:27
(21) "...In a memo last week that dealt primarily with his con cerns that black history is being taught inadequately, Mayor Koch asked Schools Chancellor Richard R. Green what was being done about the city's slang-slinging youth? [sic]
About his chief concerns: Why can't students say "ask" instead of "ax"? Koch has raised such concerns before. In a letter to Dr. Green in November, Koch and his staff and friends identified the six most mispronounced words or phrases as language usages that he believes are "objectionable" because they are "ungrammatical and lack syntax". Among them:
=Dropping the letter 'g' from participles, as in "goin''' instead of "going".
=Pronouncing "picture" as "pitcher".
=Improper use of the verb "to be", as in "we be going".
=Use of "ain't" instead of "isn't".
=Improper use of personal pronouns, as in "she sent it to you and I"..."
Almost every feature that riled Hizoner is characteristic of spoken, infor mal English spoken by less-educated whites in vast areas outside New York City. Nonetheless, the exclusive association of such offenses with the speech of (urban) blacks was taken for granted.
1.2.9. Geographical dialects
Any speech community large enough and wide-spread enough is bound to show variation across geographic space. Such variation is again most apparent in the spoken register, where regionalisms are well documented across both North America and Britain. The educated register on both sides of the Atlantic, on the other hand, is much more uniform and rela tively non-regional. Regional dialects are therefore more likely to be associated with rural, working class, poorer, less-educated speech com munities. For members of such communities, as for the members of ethnic minorities, learning the non-regional literate register is an obvious step toward gaining access to economic power and social status. This is a cultural reality that no well-meaning ideological ranting and raving is likely to change soon.
1.2.10. Grammar and foreign talk
English is spoken as a second language over a vast and rapidly expand ing swath of our planet. While our descriptions are rightly confined to native-like fluent grammar, one must acknowledge the existence of a large number of less-than-native varieties of English that are attested world-wide. The grammars and sound-patterns of such non-native varieties may indeed seem odd to the unaccustomed ear. Nevertheless, there is no ques tion but that the users of these forms of English are engaging in systematic, and on the whole successful and coherent, acts of communication. As an illustration of how far off-center non-native varieties may stray, consider the following notice to hotel guests:28
(22) "CERTAINTY AND GUEST DISCIPLINE WHO STAY AT THE HOTEL/LODGING IN CIBERON REGION
I. Every guest who will stay at the hotel must report to the hotel's receptionist and give up the inhabitant card (KTP) for a while that can be used or other clear testimonial completely.
II. For foreign guest citizen must fill "A" register and if they are in Indonesia must show sign letter self report (STMD) and other street letter that can be used and for other foreigners must show passport and document from Immigration Office. Based on P.P. number: 45 in 1954 act 5 and 6 about act regula tion foreigners problem.
III. Every hotel guest/lodging must respect and take care of the Politeness (dress way and talking) also may not bring animal to room.
IV. Every hotel guest/lodging may not do something who law invade such as: gambling, intoxicating and have sexual intercourse, save, bring also use forbid things at the hotel/lodging.
V. Every hotel guest/lodging must take care of the things and room security and may not do the activity outside hotel function/lodging and if there are things destruction from the hotel/lodging every guest must change and the things owned by guest which are not saved to hotel tasker/lodging there are lost things/ broken the settler of the hotel or lodging not respon sible...
X. ...Transgressions for these certainties become guest risk."
1.2.11. Grammar and individual style
The locus of linguistic creativity and innovation is the individual speaker. Ultimately, no two speakers — even if they be members of the same family — use the very same grammar. And while variation among members of a small community or blood kins may be considered trivial or negligible, it is always there. Such subtle variation is a tribute to the
indomitable spirit of human speakers, engaged even in the most mundane speech-acts, as they go about interpreting their daily experience and com municating it to others. And as they go about the business of communicat ing, they slowly and inexorably change the instrument of communication, trying to find better, faster, more transparent or more expressive ways of "saying the same thing".29
1.3. GRAMMAR FOR COMMUNICATION
1.3.1. Major functions of languageHuman language serves many functions, not all of them directly linked to the two major tasks of mental representation of experience or its com
munication to others. Some of those meta-communicative other functions
are:
(a) Socio-cultural cohesion functions: Language is often the main venue for both maintaining the socio-cultural cohesion of a group and signalling the identification of individuals with the group. (b) Inter-personal affective functions: Language plays a major role
in mediating the interaction between members of a group, in sig nalling affect, cooperation, obligation, dominance or competi tion.
(c) Aesthetic functions: Language is an important venue for signal ling aesthetic values, in oratory, fiction, poetry, song and thea ter.
Grammar indeed partakes, in one way or another, in the performance of all these meta-communicative functions. Nonetheless, the part contributed by grammar to the performance of these meta-communicative functions is in some way secondary. The bulk of our grammatical apparatus finds its prim ary use in the information-processing function of language, that is in the mental coding and verbal communication of information.
1.3.2. Words, clauses, discourse
Language in its narrower core function, as an instrument of coding and communicating information, involves three well-coded, concentrically arrayed functional realms:
(a) Word (meaning) (b) Clauses (information) (c) Discourse (coherence)
Words in our lexicon code our concepts of entities; words thus have
meaning. The entities coded by words may 'exist' in several distinct senses.
First, they may be part of our experience of the so-called external ('real')
world, accessible in principle to all members of the human species. Second,
they may be part of each person's internal mental world, accessible to that person only. Third, they may be part of our socially-negotiated cultural uni
verse, within which we construe both external and internal entities as well
as customs, institutions, interpretations, behavior patterns and so on. This universe is taken to be accessible to all members of the same culture. In most speech communities, the cultural universe is the most inclusive uni verse, subsuming the external universe. It also subsumes at least some por tions of the internal universe, presumably those that — via communication and repeated comparison — have come to be regarded as socially-shared.30
Clauses, also called sentences, code propositions. A proposition com bines concepts — i.e. words — into information. Information is about rela
tions, qualities, states or events in which entities partake. And those rela
tions, qualities, states or events may again reflect in some fashion our exter nal world, internal world, culturally-negotiated world, or various combina tions thereof.
In discourse, lastly, individual propositions are combined together into
coherent communication or coherent text. Discourse is thus predominantly
multi-propositional, and its coherence is a property that transcends the bounds of isolated propositions.
To illustrate the combinatorial relation of word-meaning, propositional
information and discourse coherence, consider the utterances:
(23) Words: a. drive b. insane constant d. abuse e. maid f. kill g. butler h. knife i. hide j . fridge
(24) Propositions:
a. The maid was driven insane.
b. The butler constantly abused the maid. The maid killed the butler with a knife. d. The maid hid the knife in the fridge last night. (25) Multi-propositional discourse:
Having been driven insane by constant abuse,
the maid killed the butler with the knife
that she had hidden in the fridge the night before.
Taken by themselves, outside any propositional context, the words in (23a-j) can only have meaning, each one coding some concept. That is, you may only ask about them questions such as:
(26) What d o e s - m e a n ?
Uttered as part of propositions, as in (24a-d), the very same words now partake in the coding of propositional information. In addition to questions of meaning as in (26), the individual propositions in (24) may now give rise to many questions of information, such as:
(27) a. Was the maid driven insane? b. Who abused the maid? Who killed the butler? d. Who did the maid kill?
e. What did the maid kill the butler with? f. Did the maid kill the butler?
g. Where did the maid hide the knife?
h. When did the maid hide the knife in the fridge?
Finally, the multi-propositional text in (25), in which the isolated prop ositions of (24) are linked, has discourse coherence. In addition to ques tions of meaning as in (26), and of information as in (27), one may also ask questions that pertain to that coherence; such as:
(28) a. Why did she kill him? b. How come she had a knife?
Why had the maid hidden the knife in the fridge?
d. Could she perhaps have talked to him first before taking such a drastic step?
e. Was her action reasonable? Was it defensible in a court of law?
The questions in (28) may appear deceptively like those in (27). How ever, each question in (27) could be answered on the basis of knowing only
one proposition in (24). In contrast, none of the questions in (28) could be
answered on the basis of such atomic propositional knowledge. Rather, the knowledge of several propositions in the coherent discourse (25), or even of the entire coherent text, is required in order to answer the questions in (28).
One may argue that on some occasions single words are used to carry information rather than merely convey conceptual meaning. As an illustra tion of such a case, consider the following exchange:
(29) a. SPEAKER A: -Who killed the butler? b. SPEAKER : -The maid.
Disregarding for the moment the definite article 'the', speaker B's response in (29b) includes only a single lexical word, 'maid'.31 However, such a
single-word response is in fact a truncated clause, standing in for the whole proposition:
(30) The maid killed the butler.
Only in the proper discourse context of (29a) could (29b) be a coherent communication, standing for the propositional information (30).
Similarly, in other rigidly prescribed communicative contexts, single-word communications may stand for more expanded propositional informa tion. Some typical examples are:
(31) a. Scalpel! (= 'Give me a scalpel!')
( > when uttered by a surgeon in the operating room) b. Water! (= 'Give me water!')
( > when uttered by a person crawling out of the desert) Mommy! (= 'Mother, I need you!')
( > when uttered by a child)
d. Gravy? (= 'Would you like some gravy?') ( > when uttered at the dinner table) e. Scram! (= 'Get out of here!')
(>when uttered by a frustrated interlocutor)
The considerable independence of conceptual meaning from proposi tional information is easy to demonstrate by constructing grammatically well-formed sentences that make no sense; that is, sentences whose words are perfectly meaningful each taken by itself, but still do not combine into a cogent proposition, as in:32
