Tag: grammar
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Constituent, adverbial, and the prepositional phrase
Consider the following sentence: (1) He is at the station. We could ask (2) Where is he? and we may also ask: (3) He is at what? or (4) What is he at? However (3) and (4) are marked in the linguistic sense. (2) seems the more natural question form. Consider (5): (5) He is…
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Agent
Just remember this: the agent of a sentence is the one doing the action of the verb. Consider the following sentences: (1) The car struck the fence. (2) The fence was struck by the car. In both (1) and (2) it is the car that is doing striking, even though in (2) it is NOT the subject.…
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Active vs. passive sentence structures
One of the reasons (there are many reason but this is just one) why we would like to change an active sentence into a passive one is because we would like to bring the object of the sentence into focus. Consider these sentences: My brother was hit by a car. A car hit my brother.…
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Actants
In any English sentence there are either zero, one, two or three actants. Actants are the “participants” of the sentence. They are either people or things. In (1) below the action of “to rain” itself is the “zero” actant. (1) It is raining. “It” is the dummy subject. In (2) and (3) the subjects “Peter” and…
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In praise of lexicogrammar
Lexicogrammar is not a word you hear much but those of a certain following – cognitive linguists, functional grammarians, etc – use this word to describe what is traditionally call vocabulary and grammar as one system rather than being two separate systems. As a researcher in prepositions this is a big deal. It means I…
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Finding the subject of a sentence
Perhaps the biggest problem with understanding long sentences is that they seem to be a lot longer than the basic syntax unit. Today we accept that there are seven basic sentence pattern types, where the possible number of obligatory units is between 2 and 4 (SVOC, SVOO and SVOA). Yet a sentence with, for example,…
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One
1. There is something to be said about linguistic determinism, and in particular relativity. Linguistic relativity says that the form or structure of a language influences the way people think, or world-view. The often quoted example is the Inuit people and the words for “snow”. Whereas in English we have snow (and perhaps sleet and slush) the…
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Dealing with long difficult to understand sentences
I have talked about the seven sentence patterns here. Those are all simple sentences. A simple sentence contains a single verb, that is, one clause. Complex sentences contain more than one verb, or two or more clauses. An SVO sentence theoretically can have three clauses, having one each for the subject, verb and object. It…
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What is morphosyntax?
Morphosyntax is another word for grammar. Grammar can be divided into morphology and syntax. Morphology is the study of words and their rules of formation. And syntax is the study of sentences and their rules of formation. Essentially, morphology and syntax are studies of the same thing – formation rules of a language – but at differing “levels”.…
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A quick introduction to Japanese syntax and particles
The Japanese language is considered syntactically a Subject-Object-Verb or SOV language in contrast to English which is considered a subject-Verb-Object or SVO language, as these two example sentences will show. (1) Ken wa (S) tama wo (O) uchimashita (V). (2) Ken (S) hit (V) the ball (O). While it is not possible to move the syntactical elements around in English without a changing…
ghoti 