English grammar - Roger Berry 2012

B11.1 Grammar beyond the sentence
B11 Beyond and beneath the sentence
Section B Development

The sentence is usually regarded as the upper limit of grammar. But we have already seen a number of ways in which a sentence can influence the grammatical make-up of a following one:

□ personal pronouns (see B2)

His wife is sick. However, she will try to come.

□ the definite article (see B3)

I found some old coins and a painting. The painting seemed valuable.

This referring back is called ’anaphora’.

The grammatical links between sentences are called ’cohesion’. In fact, such links may occur between clauses as well as between sentences.

Two further techniques in creating cohesion are the use of proforms and ellipsis.

Proforms

Proforms are words that are used to replace or refer to a longer construction in a sentence. The most typical proforms are pronouns:

I’ve got a new car and Johns got one too. (= ’John’s got a car’)

John and Mary hurt themselves in the accident. (’. . . hurt John and Mary . . .’) However, there are other words which have this function, for example so:

Are they coming? - I hope so.

Here so represents a subordinate clause ’that they are coming’. Not can be used for the equivalent negative:

I hope not. (’. . . that they are not coming.’)

This should not be confused with the archaic use of not for forming negative verb phrases (as in I know not . . .) discussed in A7.

Do is another proform:

Who knows how to do it? - I do. (= ’know how to do it’) Here do replaces not just the verb but the object as well.

Ellipsis

Ellipsis involves leaving out elements; it is common in answers:

Would you like to go to the cinema? - I’m afraid I can’t.

Here ’go to the cinema’ has been ’left out’. We also find ellipsis in coordination:

He finished his drink and then (he) walked home.

The difference between this and proforms is that ellipsis replaces something with nothing. But in both cases the missing text can be recovered from the context.

The purpose of such proforms and ellipsis is not only to make sentences shorter and avoid being repetitive, but also to create ’cohesion’ within a text - to show readers or listeners that the sentences belong together. There are other ways of showing cohesion: linking adverbs (across sentences - see B4) and conjunctions (within sentences - see A9), for example:

Most of the audience didn’t like the film, but I enjoyed it.

There are also lexical links which may reinforce grammatical ones, as in this case of anaphora:

I bought a BMW last week and the next day the stupid car wouldn’t start.

And we will see extensive use of another type of ellipsis in A12 regarding spoken English.

Activity B11.1

Identify the cohesive links in these short passages taken from the text in C11.

1. For a brief moment I understood what Betty and Barney Hill went through. It was today in 1961 that something extraordinary happened to this rather ordinary American couple - they were abducted by aliens.

2. Otzi lived about 5,300 years ago, yet we know quite a lot about him.