Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

3.2 Grammars of language
Unit 3 Analysing units of structure
Section 1 Basic techniques and problem-solving

The most basic way we can represent the structure of a written (or spoken) text is by means of a set of organizing principles called a grammar. To understand how units of structure function in a particular text we need first to consider the grammar of a language more generally.

3.2.1 The descriptive grammar of a language

The descriptive grammar of a language is a theory of how words can be thought of as different kinds of unit, how those units fit together into larger units (called phrases), and how these larger units combine into sentences. The grammar of English (like all other human languages) turns out to be quite complicated, and parts of it are even now, despite generations of research, not well understood. It is nevertheless possible, by looking at the most basic elements of the system - words and the different parts of speech they can be grouped into - to see the scope and power of even incomplete grammatical description.

If we were to build a grammatical description of our own, we might begin with a basic rule that says that a sentence is made up of a sequence of units called ’words’. This seems adequate for the following sentence:

(1) someone lived in a pretty little town

But if we reorder these words, our basic grammatical rule turns out to be only partly reliable:

(2) someone pretty lived in a little town

(3) someone lived a in pretty little town

We recognize that sentence (2) is an acceptable sentence, while sentence (3) is not. Our theory of units, as it stands, cannot explain why (3) is not an acceptable sentence. So, in order to understand why changing the order of words gives these different results, we need to distinguish between different kinds of words, on the basis of their different functions in sentences. In other words, we need to divide the basic unit ’word’ into a number of sub-units, such as ’noun’, ’verb’, ’adjective’, ’article’ and so on. These different sub-units, or types of words, are called parts of speech.

Using available distinctions between parts of speech, we might now analyse our original sentence as follows:

In sentence (3) above, the problem seems to lie in the sequence ’a in pretty’. Using analysis by part of speech, this sequence takes the following form: article-preposition-adjective. Since this sequence does not make sense in the above example, we might add a provisional descriptive rule to our grammar: that a preposition does not come between an article and an adjective.

Rules are only useful, however, if they apply in most cases. So we should now try out our rule using other words in the article-preposition-adjective positions. The sequence ’the of happy’, for example, also turns out to be a combination that is never found in a normal-sounding English sentence. In fact, we have found a general grammatical rule in English and can safely predict that prepositions will never appear in between an article and an adjective.

Table 3.1 Parts of speech

Not all grammatical rules are as straightforward or as general in their application as this one. But the process of discovering them would be essentially the same. By analysing sequences, formulating provisional rules, testing them out with different combinations of words, and modifying the rules where necessary, we could build up our own descriptive grammar of English. In doing so, we would learn important things about the structure and possibilities of the language.

The system of units called ’parts of speech’ has been studied since classical times. Some fairly generally accepted names for different parts of speech, together with examples, are set out in Table 3.1 (note that this list of parts of speech is not exhaustive).