Daniel Kies Department of English College of DuPage
Modern English Grammar English 2126		Contact Form

Introduction

The Clause

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The word "grammar" has many meanings. For some people, grammar specifies the "correct" way to speak or write. For others, the word refers to the inflections (the word endings) common in many languages. For still others, the grammar is about how humans organize ideas into words. The word "grammar" means all of those things. But, for us, the word means something quite specific: grammar describes how we choose and arrange our words.

Yet grammar is more than passively learning ideas about the organization of words in a language. Grammar is also an activity; it is something we do. For example, consider this paragraph from the opening of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange.

There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brother, have forgotten what these mestos were like things changing so skorry these days and everybody very quick to forget, newspaper not being read much neither. Well, what they sold there was milk plus something else. They had no license for selling liquor, but there was no law yet against prodding some of the new veshches which they would put into the old moloko, so you could peet it with vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other veshches which would give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog And All His Holy Angels And Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg. Or you could peet it with knives in it, as we use to say, and this would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of dirty twenty-to-one, and that was what we were peeting this evening I'm starting off the story with.

As you read the paragraph above, your thinking probably went through several stages: first, you noticed the unusual words and felt a certain uneasiness about the language; it seemed to be English, but not quite right. Then, you probably noticed that several of the unusual words had ending that you recognized or were surrounded by familiar words. Finally, having guessed at the meaning of those unusual words from context clues in that paragraph, you could reread the paragraph more easily. In other words, you were acting as a grammarian already: you

• observed the language data (by noticing the unusual words in their contexts),
• collected a few pertinent facts (by noticing that several words were placed near function words like the or of and by noticing word endings like -s or -ing, clues to how the strange words functioned in those clauses),
• made and tested a hypothesis (by rereading a sentence after revising mentally to add the information you collected by noticing the word's position and endings), and
• reached a conclusion (that your hypothesis was correct because the paragraph made more sense).

In short, those are the same steps any linguist takes when studying any phenomenon in language, including grammar.

Furthermore, understanding that paragraph from A Clockwork Orange means understanding (at least at some level) and using all the fundamental concepts of grammar: categories, constituency, and metafunctions. The concept of category allows us to recognize that several of the unfamiliar words belong to the word category 'noun.' Another concept, constituency, allows us to recognize that several unusual sequences of words in the first paragraph (such as Bog And All His Holy Angels And Saints or Korova Milkbar) must be single units, despite the fact that they are odd sequences of words. Finally, through a concept of metafunction, we are able to recognize several additional facts about that paragraph: even though the words are unusual for English, the sentences are statements (rather than question or commands); moreover, the 'theme' of paragraph is largely about Alex's perceptions about milkbars, particularly the Korova Milkbar.

Yet before we begin to explore more examples of the grammar of human language at work, let's first settle some initial concerns: what does 'grammar' mean and what is the place of grammar in the structure of language as a whole?

SOME PRELIMINARIES

Grammar is about how units of language are sequenced, since quite obviously language proceeds sequentially, linearly: in speech, one sound is uttered before the next, one syllable before the next, one word before the next, and so on; in writing, one word precedes the next, one phrase precedes the next, one clause precedes the next, and so on. So at some point in the production (and the same is true in the inverse for the perception) of language, humans must take all their thoughts, requests, desires, and hopes that are relevant within a particular context of situation and produce language that expresses those meanings and organizes those ideas sequentially. The same is true in the inverse for the perception of language.

Now one might quite rightly ask doesn't the word 'grammar' alone suggest some sequential arrangement of linguistic units? Yes, the idea of grammar (both in its popular and in several of its technical senses) does emphasize the importance of the right sequence of words, phrases, and clauses within a sentence. However, there are many reasons why those of us who are fascinated by language and interested in accurately describing and explaining how language works should pay close attention to words in grammar. For our purposes here, we will discuss only two.

First, if we were to ask people what they thought were the fundamental building blocks of language, they would very likely say "Words" more than any other response (with "syllable" the only real competition). Words seem to be the most obvious component of language, and any theory that fails to account for the contribution of words to the functioning of language is unworthy of our attention. (See Halliday 1994.) So for that reason alone we need to include words in our study of grammar. Moreover, there are many other, less obvious, reasons why we need to attend to words in our grammatical description.

To illustrate this second reason for the importance of words in our description of grammar, consider sentences (1) through (4):

1. The water evaporated.
2. The dog evaporated.
3. The water evaporated quickly.
4. The water evaporated the dog.

Sentences (1) through (4) illustrate that the word evaporate is restricted in its usage in quite specific ways. But if we had only to work with a grammar of English that examines grammatical structures without referring to the lexicon, we would quickly discover the weakness of our grammatical analysis. For example, looking at the structure of the sentences in (1) through (4), we see some really quite ordinary arrangements of clause elements, arrangements that occur regularly in English. In (1) and (2), we have the Subject-Verb (SV) pattern; in (3) we see the Subject-Verb-Adverbial (SVA) pattern; in (4) we find the Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) pattern. Now a grammar that ignores the lexicon will describe all the sentences in (1) through (4) as well-formed structures (since they are after all very common clause patterns), only to realize the inadequacy of such a description and propose some kind of remedy to the problem elsewhere in the theory.

However, if the theory incorporates into its grammar all the meaningful distinctions found in the lexicon, then there need be no division between the grammatical and lexical 'levels' in our analysis of language. In our example, in other words, our grammar will be sensitive to the fact that in real language, we must distinguish between transitive (verbs that can occur with an object in an SVO pattern) and intransitive (verbs that may not occur with an object, but may occur with some other complement, such as an adverbial, as in the SV and SVA patterns) early on in our description of the language. Thus, by recognizing that some forms function as intransitive verbs, we can explain why (4) seems so peculiar, while (1) and (3) seem quite ordinary. Further, if our description of the language - our grammar that is - also recognizes the distinction between verbs that can co-occur with 'agent' subjects as opposed to those verbs that do not, then we can explain why (2) seems odd.

Now that we have some sense of why the lexicon contributes so substantially to our understanding of a language's grammar, we may go on to consider grammar's place in the structure of language. Halliday posits four strata at work, simultaneously, in the production and perception of language:

• the context of the language situation
• meaning (semantics)
• wording (grammar)
• sound patterns (phonology and phonetics)

To illustrate how the different levels of language co-exist, consider the odd examples of sentences (2) and (4) again. Given our conventional world as the context for the language situation we are in at this moment, sentences like (2) and (4) do seem strange since they suggest ideas that we recognize as unlikely. But, if we changed the context of situation to that of science fiction, suddenly sentences like (2) and (4) make sense. Assuming some alternate universe where our laws of physics are pushed beyond our experience or altogether void, sentences (2) and (4) are meaningful.

For another example, consider these sets of contexts and sentences: all four sentences are requests for an open window from the speaker to a listener. However, the context of situation is different for each sentence. Which sentence goes with which situation below?

	Sentence		Situation
(a)	Pardon me, sir, but would you mind opening the window?	(i)	Doing homework with your girl-/boyfriend.
(b)	Open the window, will ya buddy?	(ii)	Baby-sitting your snotty younger brother.
(c)	Open the window NOW.	(iii)	Meeting with the dean in his office.
(d)	Gee, it's hot in here.	(iv)	Sitting on a bus next to a man dressed in work clothes.

If you found that you could match (a) with (iii), (b) with (iv), (c) with (ii), and (d) with (i), then you were experiencing how context, meaning, and wording all mutually interact in language.

In (a), notice that the context of situation (meeting with the dean in his office) places us in a socially less powerful position. After all, we are in his office; we are not on his social/political level. Therefore, when we make a request of someone 'above' us on some social scale, notice how the meaning and the wording (grammar) change: the request is not in the form of a command, but more politely put in the form of a question. Yet even though the grammar of (a) is the form of a question that could be answered by yes or no, we do not mean it to be interpreted as a question, nor do we expect it to be interpreted by the dean as a yes/no question. (Indeed, if the dean answered "No," we could most likely interpret the response as either an attempt at humor or an act of hostility.) Other markers of politeness in (a) are the speaker's request for permission to speak (Pardon me) and the vocative (sir).

In (b) and (c), we find two forms that are commands. We can distinguish them and match their contexts because of the differing markers of politeness in each. In (b), the tag question at the end of the command undercuts the forcefulness of the command, as does the familiar term of address (buddy) and the informal pronunciation of the pronoun you. Those features of grammar point to a situation in which one is probably speaking to a stranger in a close situation. In (c), however, one finds the same command ending with a heavily stressed time adverbial, highlighting through the grammar the forcefulness of the command and the speaker's social power.

In (d), we have another form that is not a command at all grammatically: it is a statement. But notice that it begins with a word to indicate the speaker's discomfort (Gee), and notice that the word hot is ambiguous in this context, possibly referring either to the speaker's temperature or the speaker's excitement in this context.

In (a) through (d), we can see, therefore, that the context of situation, the meaning, the grammar, and even the sound patterns mutually interact to create the language we use. But notice in those examples that the choices of wording (grammar) do not simply encode meaning: rather, the grammar makes meaning. That distinction is fundamental between this theory of language (systemics) and other theories of grammar.

To understand more about grammar, we must now examine the grammatical constituents of language (categories), how those constituents combine at different levels (constituency), and how those combinations of constituents can create meaning (metafunction).

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