Lecture No. 3 (Part 1)

EL1102 Studying English in Context 00/01
Notes for Lecture No. 3 (Part 1)

1. What is grammar?

grammar (organisation of words into sentences)
lexis (organisation of words — arrangement and choice)
phonology (organisation of sounds)

I don’t want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady. [Eliza Dolittle in Pygmalion]

I used to get mad at my school,
the teachers who taught me weren’t cool,
holding me down, turning me round,
filling me up with your rules … [The Beatles]

[G]rammar for linguists is the level of their analysis of linguistic structure which concerns the organisation of words into sentences. [Leith 1983, p. 92]

ALL languages and ALL dialects have ‘grammar’.

Different ‘levels’ of grammar

How would you divide up this sentence?

My first sight of England was on a foggy March night in 1973 when I arrived on the midnight ferry from Calais. For twenty minutes, the terminal area was aswarm with activity as cars and lorries poured forth, customs people did their duties, and everyone made for the London road. [Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island (1995), p. 11]

‘comma units’? — informal

For twenty minutes, || the terminal area was aswarm with activity as cars and lorries poured forth, || customs people did their duties, || and everyone made for the London road.

more ‘meaningful’ bits that can be isolated?

For twenty minutes, the terminal area was aswarm with activity || as cars and lorries poured forth, || customs people did their duties, || and everyone made for the London road.

Definition of clause (tentative)

[W]e have to be able to combine words into meaningful message structures and the most fundamental message structure in any language – in terms of a message that has any sort of completeness about it – is a clause. [Butt et al. 1995: 35]

Clauses into phrases

For twenty minutes, | the terminal area | was | aswarm with activity

Phrases of more than one word, eg

For twenty minutes

the terminal area

Words into morphemes (note: different from syllables)

fog-gy

arriv(e)-ed

mid-night

a-swarm

act-iv(e)-ity

We can therefore break down the sentence into the following components.

A sentence is made up of one or more clauses;
a clause is made up of one or more phrases;
a phrase is made up of one or more words; and
a word is made up of one or more morphemes.

Analyse this?

Then abruptly all was silence and I wandered through sleeping, low-lit streets threaded with fog, just like in a Bulldog Drummond movie. [Notes from a Small Island, p. 11]

Then | abrupt-ly | all | was | silence || and | I | wandered | through sleep-ing, low-lit streets threaded with fog, | just like in a Bulldog Drummond movie.

2. Dialects

regional dialects and class dialects

The difference between accent and dialect seems relatively simple to describe: accent consists of pronunciation; dialect consists of grammar, words and their meanings, and pronunciation. [Graddol 1996, p. 270]

Dialects are language varieties which differ from one another grammatically as well as in other ways. People who say I ain’t got none are speakers of a different dialect from those who say I haven’t got any. [Andersson and Trudgill 1992, p. 165]

POPULAR USAGE: language v. dialect (language = standard variety; dialect = non-standard variety)

USAGE BY LINGUISTS: all varieties (standard or non-standard) = dialects

Example: in Chinese dialectology: Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, and Min (Hokkien, Teochew) dialects.

Example of English dialects: English, Scottish, Irish, Canadian, American, Jamaican, New Zealand, Pakistani, Singaporean and South African dialects. And within England, we can go further and talk about the Yorkshire dialect or the Cockney dialect of English.

Some say: ‘A language is a dialect with an army.’

The examples above have been mainly regional dialects. We can also talk about working-class dialects or upper class dialects.

3. Getting hold of data

(a) introspection (grammatical v ungrammatical? usual v unusual?)

PROBLEMS

A lot of people are also not very good at imagining themselves in particular situations where they might use the language differently.

The informant is not a teacher, nor a linguist; he is simply a native speaker of the language willing to help the linguist in his work. [R. H. Robins, General Linguistics ix (1964), p. 355]

The theoretical objection one may make against the ‘corpus’ method is that two investigators operating on the same language but starting from different ‘corpuses’ [note: the usual plural is ‘corpora’], may arrive at different descriptions of the same language. [E. Palmer (tr.) Martinet’s Elementary General Linguistics ii (1964), p. 40]

PROBLEMS: a lot of work; must be large; unavailability of (eg personal) data; ‘errors’ of usage

Collins Cobuild Dictionary is, for example, is based on a corpus of the English language called ‘The Bank of English’ (http://titania.cobuild.collins.co.uk). It is possible to search the corpus (using, for example, its concordancing tool).

For example, we might be interested if the word congregation takes on a singular or plural verb form. If I search one part of the corpus, I might see the following.

Obviously, many of the citations are not useful because congregation does not occur as subject or if it does, the verb is in the past tense form that does not make number distinctions. Only the highlighted example shows the use of the singular verb form was. What I will need to do is examine more parts of the corpus to see if it is indeed the case that congregation always takes a singular verb form.

RULE OF THUMB: they can often be modified by determiners (like a, the, my, some) before them

A pronoun is a word that stands for (pro-), or refers to, a noun
A first-person pronoun refers to the speaker(s)
A second-person pronoun refers to the person or people being addressed
A third-person pronoun refers to a third party, usually not in the vicinity.

Distinctions of person, number (singular or plural) and case (subject, non-subject, etc.). Tyneside English:

(The novel is set in the 1920s in the English Midlands, and Mellors the game-keeper is talking to Lady Constance Chatterley.)

He tramped with a quiet inevitability over the brick floor, putting food for the dog in a brown bowl. The spaniel looked up at him anxiously.

He set the bowl on the stairfoot mat, and sat himself on a chair by the wall, to take off his leggings and boots. The dog instead of eating, came to him again, and sat looking up at him, troubled.

‘What’s amiss wi’ thee then? Art upset because there’s somebody else here? Tha’rt a female, tha art! Go an’ eat thy supper.’

He put his hand on her head, and the bitch leaned her head sideways against him. He slowly, softly pulled the long silky ear.

He tilted his chair towards the pot on the mat, and the dog meekly went, and fell to eating.

traditional (non-linguistic) definition is that a verb is a ‘doing’ or ‘action’ word

formal criteria: in contemporary Standard English can take four forms: the base form (eg looked), the -s form (looks), the –ed form (looked) and the –ing form (looking).

Tense is a category in grammar that can be seen in the verb form (inflexion) chosen; it is used to locate an event or situation in time — linguists describe English as having two tenses: past and non-past (eg ‘walked’ v. ‘walk/s’).

Aspect is another term frequently used in relation to the verb phrase. It is a grammatical category that has to do with the meaning of the verb in relation to time. Aspect provides information such as whether an event or situation is continuing or completed; or whether it’s a one-off event as opposed to one that is habitual, or repeated. Standard English has two aspects: the perfective (eg ‘I have walked a mile’) and the progressive (eg ‘I am walking home’; this is sometimes called ‘continuous’). The two aspects can also be combined (eg ‘I have been walking home’).

1 (a) I walk a mile. [n-pa]
(b) I walked a mile. [pa]
(c) I have walked a mile. [n-pa, perf]
(d) I had walked a mile. [pa, perf]
(e) I am walking a mile. [n-pa, prog]
(f) I was walking a mile. [pa, prog]

2 (a) I have chicken pox.
(b) I had chicken pox.
(c) I have had chicken pox.
(d) I am having chicken pox.

Sentences 3 and 4 are not available in Standard English, but are possible in colloquial Singaporean and Malaysian English. This is understandable if we also look at sentences 5 and 6. In Malay and Hokkien, the two languages that have had strong influence on colloquial Singaporean and Malaysian English, the notion of completion is expressed by the addition of the words sudah and liáu (cf. Mandarin le), both of which mean ‘already’. It is therefore not surprising that sentences 3 and 4 are available for expressing completion in this variety of English.

1 I have eaten.
2 I have eaten already.
3 I eat already.
4 I already eat.
5 (a) Saya sudah makan. [Malay]
(b) I already eat. [literal translation]
6 (a) Goá chiåh pá liáu. [Hokkien Chinese]
[á = upper tone; å = lower entering tone]
(b) I eat full already. [literal translation]

(a) She pushed a door open.	Std E (count noun; any door)
(b) She pushed the door open.	Std E (count noun; a particular door)
(c) She pushed door open.	Colloq. Singaporean English

(a) Chocolate is nice.	Std E (non-count; ‘chocolate’ in general)
(b) The chocolate is nice.	Std E (non-count; definite)
(c) A chocolate is nice.	Informal (ellipsis)?

(a) He’s in hospital again.	BrE (= he’s been hospitalised, warded [SgE])
(b) He’s in the hospital again.	BrE (eg visiting); AmE, Scottish E

(a) I will be in the bank.	Std E
(b) I will be in bank.	Some African varieties; CSE

South-west England	East Anglia/SCE	Standard English	archaic
I loves	I love	I love
you loves	you love	you love	thou lovest, ye love
she loves	she love	she loves	she loveth
he loves	he love	he loves	he loveth
it loves	it love	it loves	it loveth
we loves	we love	we love
they loves	they love	they love

		Tyneside non-standard		Standard
Person		Subject	Non-subject	Subject	Non-subject
Singular	1st	I	us	I	me
	2nd	ye	you	you	you
	3rd	she	her	she	her
		he	him	he	him
		it	it	it	it
Plural	1st	us	we	we	us
	2nd	yous	yous/yees	you	you
	3rd	they	them	they	them