English grammar - Roger Berry 2012
C11 Exploring texts (3): Putting it all together
Section C Exploration
In this section we will try to analyse a fairly long text from many different angles, not just according to sentence type (C9) or subordinate clause type (C10), as was the case with the texts in those sections. You will need to refer back to many previous sections; these are indicated in the activities. In this way, this section serves as a summary and revision of much of the book.
The text is an article taken from a magazine accompanying an English Sunday newspaper. It is written in a humorous style, and the use of grammar in it is part of that style. Read it and then do the activities afterwards.
Sandi Toksvig, ’Proving your identity to a bank can be like proving you were abducted by aliens’, Sunday Telegraph, September 19, 2010
A (1) The other day I phoned my bank, which, in essence, sounds a simple operation. (2) Yet even the least cynical among you will sniff the beginning of a saga. (3) The bank had made a slight error and I wished to assist them in correcting it.
B (1) After making many numeric choices I was asked to input the long number across the front of my debit card on my telephone keypad. (2) This takes time as I have to find the card, then my glasses, then juggle the phone, the card, the glasses. (3) I found, I juggled, I inputted and finally spoke to someone whose first question was: ’What is the long number across the front of your debit card?’ (4) I know better than to reply: ’It’s the one that I just inputted’ so the glasses went back on, I juggled the phone, I repeated the number.
C (1) The operator was not satisfied. (2) Perhaps she thought that she could hear the washing machines quietly laundering money in the background. (3) ’What is your date of birth?’ she asked.
D (1) ’Third of May 1958’, I replied.
E (1) There was a long pause. (2) ’That’s not what I have here,’ she intoned with an unexpected hint of menace.
F (1) ’I don’t know what to tell you,’ I stammered, ’that is my birthday. (2) Has been since, well since, since 1958. (3) I’m 52,’ I added, even though she worked for a bank and so presumably had some basic arithmetic skills. (4) ’What do you have as my birthday?’ I inquired.
G (1) ’I can’t tell you that,’ she said, ’it’s a security question.’
H (1) ’Right. (2) So I can’t pass security because I don’t know when you think my birthday might be which isn’t when I thought it was?’
I (1) I have reached a stage where I have so many different passwords in varying formats for such a range of activities that I began to wonder if I had in fact forgotten my birthday. (2) The upshot is that, having been with the same bank since I was 14, I now find myself having to prove to them who I am. (3) How absurd. (4) They must know who I am. (5) I spend quite a lot of time in a property that strictly speaking belongs to them.
J (1) Proving who you are is a curious notion and should be reserved for people like Otzi the Iceman. (2) It was today in 1991 that two German tourists (Helmut and Erika Simon, if you must know), were sauntering about a glacier on the Austrian- Italian border when they came across what they thought was someone who had recently spoiled a nice day out by dying.
K (1) In fact, they had discovered Europe’s oldest natural human mummy. (2) Otzi lived about 5,300 years ago, yet we know quite a lot about him. (3) He was roughly 5ft 5in, 107 pounds when he popped his bear skin, grass lined shoes.
L (1) It’s remarkable really, but by poking around his tooth enamel archaeologists have worked out what village he came from, that his last venison supper was eaten in a ’mid-altitude conifer forest’, he probably worked in copper-smelting, often went for long walks and was poorly three times in the months before he died, for which he may well have had acupuncture. (2) All of this information gathered without him saying a thing or having a password.
M (1) I don’t feel I need such rigorous analysis and think it would be nice if the bank could just believe me when I declare I know when I was born. (2) They weren’t even interested when I offered to get my mother to call and say she was there at the time.
N (1) For a brief moment I understood what Betty and Barney Hill went through. (2) It was today in 1961 that something extraordinary happened to this rather ordinary American couple - they were abducted by aliens. (3) Not for long. (4) They were home the next day. Betty and Barney lived in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he worked for the Post Office and she was a social worker.
O (1) Driving home from holiday they saw a bright light in the sky. (2) Soon an object with multicoloured lights was flashing above the place. (3) Naturally the road was entirely deserted as everyone knows there is nothing extraterrestrials hate more than a crowd. (4) When the thing began hovering over their 1957 Chevy, Barney did the only sensible thing - he got a gun which, like any self-respecting American, he kept in the boot for bears, and went to have a closer look.
P (1) He could see ’about 8 to 11 humanoid figures’ looking at him through the space craft windows and decided now was a good time to depart. (2) The aliens, though, proved faster than a Chevy and nabbed them.
Q (1) By the time the Hills got home they had torn clothing and a slight ringing in the ears. (2) They phoned the Air Force who helpfully decided the whole matter was clearly a misidentification of the planet Jupiter. (3) This failed to explain the Hills’ recollection of being aboard a disc-shaped craft where small men with big eyes poked at their teeth and genitals in a clumsy alien attempt at making intergalactic friends. (4) Needless to say no one believed the poor couple.
R (1) Bankers seem like aliens to me. (2) Maybe I should let them have a poke at my teeth. (3) Of course, if they decide to have a go at my nether parts as well, I shan’t be the least bit surprised.
Activity C11.1
Tense (B6)
Most of the article uses the past tense. However, there are places where the present tense (including present perfect) is used as well - paragraphs A, B and I, for example. Why is this so? (Ignore the tenses in direct speech.)
Activity C11.2
Identifying and using the passive (A6, A11)
There are six places in the text where an -ed word is preceded by a form of be; they are shown below. Some of these represent passives but others are combinations of the verb be (as opposed to auxiliary be) and an -ed adjective. Distinguish them and say why the passive is used in each case.
B(1) I was asked . . .
C(1) The operator was not satisfied . . .
M(2) They weren’t even interested . . .
L(1) his last venison supper was eaten . . .
N(2) they were abducted . . .
O(3) the road was entirely deserted . . .
Activity C11.3
Complex sentences and subordinate clauses (A9, A10)
a) Look at sentences H(2) and M(1). How many finite verb phrases (and therefore finite clauses) are there in each?
b) How are they joined (i.e. what conjunction or subordinator is used)?
c) How can we explain that some of the subordinate clauses have no explicit link? How could we make the links explicit?
Activity C11.4
Reporting speech (B12)
In paragraphs A to I speech is normally represented directly, using the exact words of the speakers. A number of different reporting verbs are used in the first part (paragraphs A to I): reply B(4), asked C(3), replied D(1), intoned E(2), stammered F(1), inquired F(2), and said (G1). However, one piece of direct speech in this part is introduced not by a verb but by another word class. What is it? And there is one piece of reported speech. What is it, and what might the exact words have been?
Activity C11.5
Clause elements (A8)
Analyse sentence J(1): Proving who you are is a curious notion. Analyse the subordinate clause and non-finite clause as well as the main clause.
Activity C11.6
Adverbs and conjunctions. (A9 and B4)
Look at the use of so in B(4), F(3), H(2), I(1) and yet in A(2) and K(2). What word classes and sub-classes do they belong to?
Activity C11.7
Verb forms (A5, A6, C5)
Look at sentence L(2): All of this information gathered without him saying a thing or having a password. What verb form is gathered here? Past tense or -ed participle?
Activity C11.8
Some more questions.
a) What is the clause element represented by on my telephone keypad in B(1)?
b) Look at paragraph B and find some verbs which are normally transitive being used intransitively. Why is this so? (A8)
c) Look at B(1). Identify the premodifiers and decide whether they are adjectives or nouns. (A3)
d) What is missing from F(2)?
e) What kind of word is which in L(1)?
f) Can you find two cleft sentences in the second part (paragraphs J to R)? (A11)
g) Find a contact relative clause in paragraph O. (B10)
h) Describe sentence I(3): How absurd. (A9, B9)
Comments
Activity C11.1:
The past tense is used because the writer is talking about the experiences of herself and other people. However, at times she departs from the narrative to make a generalisation, for example
A(1) which . . . sounds a simple operation.
B(2) 'This takes time as I have to . . . (She could equally have written This took time as I had to . . . if she had wanted to refer to that specific moment.)
or to refer to the current state of affairs
I(1) I have reached a stage where I have . . .
I(2) The upshot is . . . I now find myself having to prove to them who I am.
Activity C11.2:
C(1), M(2) and O(3) contain -ed adjectives, not participles as part of passives.
The passive is used in:
B(1) to avoid mentioning the agent. She was talking to an automatic answering machine; so the passive shows how impersonal the process was.
L(1) because the agent is already known.
N(2) to satisfy the information principle: they represents given information, while abducted by aliens is new.
Activity C11.3:
a) There are seven finite verb phrases in H(2) and eight in M(1), underlined below:
H(2) So I can't pass security because I don’t know when you think my birthday might be which isn’t when I thought it was?
M(1) I don’t feel I need such rigorous analysis and think it would be nice if the bank could just believe me when I declare I know when I was born.
Both have a highly complex clause structure; the subordination is very dense, especially in H(2), where the writer is trying to show the stupidity of the situation.
b) The links are:
H(2) because, when, which and when
M(1) and, if, when and when
c) Some of the subordinate clauses are nominal contact clauses (see A10); they have no subordinator to introduce them and separate them from the preceding clause (in which they function as objects). This is why there are only four explicit links in H(2) (when there should be six), and four in M(1) (when there should be seven). We can make the links explicit by inserting that, as follows:
H(2) So I can't pass security because I don’t know when you think that my birthday might be which isn’t when I thought that it was?
M(1) I don’t feel that I need such rigorous analysis and think that it would be nice if the bank could just believe me when I declare that I know when I was born.
Activity C11.4:
In B(3) the direct speech is introduced by a noun: whose first question was . . . The reported speech is in B(1): asked to input . . . (from possibly ’Could you please input . . .’)
Activity C11.5:
The clause structure is S (Proving who you are) V (is) Ps (a curious notion). The subject is itself a non-finite clause consisting of the verb (proving) and its object (who you are), which is itself a nominal subordinate clause consisting of a predicative (who) that has been fronted, a subject (you) and verb (are). Note that Proving who you are acts as a link to the previous text, which is why this information is placed first.
Activity C11.6:
So in B(4) is a conjunction, while in F(3) and H(2) it is a linking adverb. In I(1) it is, of course, an intensifier, or degree adverb. As regards yet, it is a linking adverb in A(2), but a conjunction in K(2).
Perhaps the hardest one is F3 (for so) because it seems to be joining two clauses. But and is the conjunction here, and so has the meaning of as a result. This could replace so in F(3) but not in B(4).
Activity C11.7:
At first sight this sentence appears to have the structure of a major sentence: All of this information (S) gathered (V) . . .; in other words, gathered seems to be the (finite) past tense. However, there are three arguments against this analysis. First, All of this information is an unlikely subject for an action verb such as gather. Second, gather is normally a transitive verb, but there is no object. Third, the time period for ’gathering’ appears to be up to the present, so a past tense sounds inappropriate.
The answer, of course, is that gathered is an -ed participle and that the rest of the verb phrase has been omitted (for stylistic reasons). The full phrase would be has been gathered, indicating a passive meaning. The sentence as it stands is therefore a minor one.
Activity C11.8:
a) It is an adverbial clause element in the non-finite clause beginning to input . . . Note that it could be placed directly after input.
b) The verbs are found, juggled and inputted in B(3). Their objects have been omitted because they have already been mentioned in B(2).
c) Numeric and long are adjectives; debit and telephone are nouns.
d) Two clause elements are missing: the subject It, which is a case of informal ’contextual’ ellipsis (see A12), and the predicative (my birthday), which is a case of ’textual’ ellipsis because it can be reconstructed from the previous text (see B11).
e) It is a sentential relative pronoun (see B10); it refers back to the previous clauses. f) The two cleft sentences are in J(2) and N(2): It was today in 1991/1961 that . . . Note how each introduces a story.
g) The contact relative clause is in O(2). It begins extraterrestrials . . . We could insert which or that as a relative pronoun before it to make the relative clause more explicit.
h) It is a minor sentence and exclamative clause type.