TJ:
Below, I'm trying to address the question you said I was begging. On the whole issue of clauses, I was mainly concerned to point out that there are multiple ways the term is defined (emphasizing this for Scott as well). In a classroom, I think we need to acknowledge that infinitives, gerunds, and participials are kinda clausy; past that, the deciding issues are going to be basic consistency and what the students' later curriculum is expecting. I saw the situation as being roughly equivalent to the one in which someone from Texas says "real chili can't have beans in it" and the person from New Mexico looks baffled (or indignant).
Regarding "understood as subject": If we use a version with a pronoun after "want," it's clear that it has to be objective ("I want them to eat vegetables"). Trying to say that "them" is the subject of "eat" creates a headache you need to deal with, somehow (with the same going for the objective or genitive "subjecty" element in some gerunds). There are multiple ways to define the term "subject," but objective/genitive marking doesn't go naturally with any of them. Most of the terminological mess here is simply a result of different linguists trying to think of ways out of that bind that don't cause their theories to crash and burn somewhere else.
In generative-esque theories, there's usually the equivalent of an alarm bell that goes off if a verb doesn't have the right number of things with it; since the grammar isn't driven by the semantics in these theories, you need some structural device to rule out sentences like "I put" and "I ate a sandwich a weasel" (the alarm bell is rather unhelpfully called a theta-filter, for no very good reason I can figure out other than that it sounds sciency). And there's another alarm that goes off if there's the wrong case-marking on something. So if you're working in one of these theories, you can't just say that "them" is understood as the subject of "eat." You have to give "eat" a "they" to make it happy, even if it's just a "they" that only the "eat" can see. If you imagine that you start with "I want that they eat vegetables" and then some rearrangements occur, you can make it work. My use of "at some level of representation" was a dodge; I don't understand what generativists think the representations *are* really, other than they're not pseudo-sentences that get turned into real ones in actual processing. I don't work in these theories (or like them much), so don't take that as evidence that there's no good definition -- I just don't know what it is. "Abstract formal relation" comes up a lot, but that's a description, not a definition.
Sincerely,
Bill Spruiell
________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of T. J. Ray [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, May 31, 2011 10:39 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Infinitives as clauses (was RE: Adjective or adverb?)
Bill,
Please allow me to intersperse some comments in what you kindly sent me. Perhaps I should
be open (if clumsy) about the terms I used in grammar classes. A clause requires a finite verb.
The non-finite verb forms may take all the attributes of finite verbs but the group of words they
are the core of cannot stand alone as a sentence. Hence, participles and infinitives may have
subjects, objects, complements, and adverbial modifiers just as finite verbs may.
The primary difference between the two sample sentences you offer in your third paragraph is that
the first infinitive does not have a subject because the subject of the main verb is taken to also be
the subject of the infinitive. In the second example "kids" is the subject of the infinitive phrase. The
explanation you offer is quite baffling to me. The phrase "a clause at some level of representation"
buzzed past me.
Your fourth paragraph begs a question. If you give a student the first example you offer and then
asked who is to eat the vegetables, my bet is that without hesitation he will point at "I." Ask the
same question of the second example, and the answer will be "kids."
This talk of reduced clauses and small clauses muddies the grammatical waters. If the core of the
group of words is a finite verb, that cluster is a clause. If it has no finite verb, it is not a clause. You
may well think me a martinet in trying to apply simplistic terms, but for more decades than I like to
recall my concern was to given students sufficient tools to figure out the meaning of a sentence.
That still strikes me as the purposing of teaching grammar to kids as opposed to graduate students
in linguistics classes.
Please pardon my ranting.
tj
On Monday 05/30/2011 at 11:23 am, "Spruiell, William C" wrote:
TJ:
You wrote,
I am also puzzled by responses that refer to them as clauses. Infinitive
phrases have functioned in this manner since A-S days. What is the
purpose of trying to stretch them into clauses?
The problem is just that they're a lot clausier than the usual phrase, and the definition of "clause" varies more than one might expect. The U.S. school grammar tradition focused on finiteness as the essential ingredient for clausehood, and if you take that as a starting point these can't be clauses. That definition of clause, as well as the use of "phrase" for all multi-word units that aren't clauses, is by no means universal.
Other approaches tend to focus on the fact that infinitives can include verbs with what look exactly like objects, etc., and that you can usually infer a subject-y element (being deliberately vague here b/c the specifics vary per approach). From a teaching standpoint, it's a lot easier getting students to recognize that a given NP is the direct object of the verb in the infinitive if they're thinking of the infinitive as at least being like a predicate.
The "clausy" view starts looking more tempting when you try to deal with the difference between "I want to eat some vegetables" and "I want the kids to eat some vegetables." If you think both of those sentences have a main clause that's just "I want X," then it follows that you need to talk about the presence or absence of "the kids" in relation to the infinitive. One of the ways to deal with that is to say that infinitive really is a clause at some level of representation -- that it has a full clause structure, but with zero-elements in some spots. The grammar (with "grammar" here in the sense of a kind of widget) can then deal with the structure the same basic way it deals with a normal clause, with maybe some minor changes around the edges. I *think* this is Bruce's approach (but correct me if I'm wrong, Bruce!).
An alternate approach is to deal with "X wants to Y" and "X wants Z to Y" as different constructions that hearers recognize and process according to construction-specific rules. This is what's used by construction grammars (unsurprisingly).
Either of these approaches can use the label "reduced clause" for infinitives, gerunds, and participials. The term "small clause" usually goes with the first approach, and is most common among linguists working in a set of theories descended from the 1970s-era version of generative grammar. Systemic-Functional grammar use "non-finite clause," a term that initially struck me as an oxymoron, since I learned U.S. terminology first. Traditional school grammars, of course, sometimes use "verbals."
--- Bill Spruiell
________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of T. J. Ray [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, May 30, 2011 9:52 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Adjective or adverb?
Stephen,
I don't see them as possible adverbials. A reading of both sentences sans
the infinitive phrases almost makes them incomplete sentences, at least in
terms of full meaning.
I am also puzzled by responses that refer to them as clauses. Infinitive
phrases have functioned in this manner since A-S days. What is the
purpose of trying to stretch them into clauses?
tj
On Friday 05/27/2011 at 8:01 pm, Stephen King wrote:
An embarrassing question: Are the infinitive phrases in the following sentences adjectival or
adverbial?
A. We were looking for a good reason to sell the house.
B. Sparrow needed something to distract the guards.
In A, the inf. phrase answers the question "why?", which would seem to make it adverbial. However, it
also answers the question "What kind of reason?", which would seem to make it adjectival. I find B
similar.
Gentle enlightenment is requested.
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
|
