And would
(4) Ellen and Gail get stoned as often as they can.
be a fourth instance? Or would it be a separate lexical
item? It probably started out as a metaphorical extension of the active
voice “to stone,” but then took on other cultural and semantic
trappings, giving us words like “stoner,” which is not a person who
stones others (I’m showing my 1960s roots). At some point the word
splits into different words whose relationship can be traced only by careful,
dogged etymological work. If past participles are the same word as the
verb they are formed from, and they’re certainly part of the same lexeme,
then at some point meaning change in “seethe” vs. “sodden”
led them to become totally distinct words. Etymologically “sodden”
is the past participle of Old English seothan “to boil,” from which
we get Modern English “seethe” by regular sound change. But
the two words are no longer related as far as speakers of English are
concerned.
On another topic, the form/function distinction is important
precisely because it allows us to deal with grammatical variation in word use
that falls short of the seethe/sodden extreme. Edmund has raised the very
difficult question of whether there is such a thing as a lexical class, and
there are languages for which the answer almost certainly has to be no, but
given the rich derivational morphology of English I’m less willing to say
that we don’t have lexical classes and that most words don’t
clearly belong to one while they can be used, under strict conditions, as
members of another. There are, granted, words for which we cannot make a
clear argument as to which class is their primary home, but the problem is not
a statistical one as Edmund suggests; it’s a matter more of prototype
theory. A word belongs to a class to the extent that it has the traits
that are prototypical of that class. “May” has some
properties of verbs, but not as many as “hit” has, and this has led
some grammarians to the position that modals are a separate class in
English. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but it’s clear
that “may” is one of the least verb-like of verbs. But this
is more a matter of prototype theory than of statistics.
There are some fairly abstruse definitions of the category “word”
in the various texts on morphology, but the one I like best and find most
teachable to undergraduates is Leonard Bloomfield’s, going back to his
Language (1933), where he defines word as “a minimal free form.”
That means that a word is the smallest piece of an utterance—remember Bloomfield
was a linguist and worked on speech, not writing—that can be said by itself.
So in a spoken sentence like
The ball’s in play.
there are two words, “ball” and “play”
(I’m staying clear of the phonological vs. morphological word
distinction). “The,” “’s,” and “in”
are not words because they are unstressed and therefore cannot be pronounced by
themselves, that is, if you try to pronounce them you get something that sounds
different from what’s in the utterance above because to isolate them in
English you have to stress them, and that changes them. This leads to a
somewhat different description of English morphology than we’re used to,
and it makes heavy use of the category “clitic.” A clitic is
a form that is unstressed and so cannot be pronounced alone. It attaches
to a phrasal category rather than to a lexical category, so “the”
attaches to a noun phrase, not to a noun. That makes clitics different
from affixes. The –s in “balls” is a suffix; the –‘s
in “ball’s” is a clitic. On the scale of morphological
units, clitic sits between affix and word, sharing some but not all of the
properties of each.
Clearly this is a somewhat more technical definition of word
than our students are used to. They tend to assume that a word is
anything you write with spaces around it, a definition that doesn’t get
us very far in linguistic analysis. You can present the “minimal
free form” definition without getting into the sort of complexity I’ve
just wallowed in, but it also allows students to begin to ask some interesting
questions.
Herb
From: Assembly for the
Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Peter
Adams
Sent: 2008-02-22 12:38
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Adverb?
This form vs function discussion is fascinating and
frustrating. My difficulty with it is illuminated by Bruce's comment:
"I think that the nouns tomorrow,
and today are
often adverbial in nature (as in your examples), and that the adverb now is
sometimes used as a noun (as in 'Now is the time for all good men to come to
the aid of their party.')" I don't understand what it means to say
that a word, in this case, tomorrow is
"a noun that is adverbial in nature."
Why wouldn't a more elegant solution be to
say that words can belong to more than one word class and that which class a
word is belongs to in a particular utterance can only be determined in context.
For example, stone is
a word that can be a noun, a verb, an adjective . . . perhaps more. In
sentence (1) below it is a noun, in (2) it is a verb, and in (3) it is an
adjective.
To me, this analysis is more intuitive and
would, therefore, make teaching these concepts to young (or old) students
easier.
(1) Ellen picked up a stone.
(2) Ellen and Gail stone their enemies
whenever they can.
(3) It is fortunate that Ellen lives in a
stone house rather than a glass one.
But all this leads me to a really basic
question: what is a word? Is stone the
same word in these three sentences or three different words? In fact, I
wonder about a sentence like (4) below:
(4) This suitcase is heavier than the
suitcase I carried yesterday.
Does (4) have ten words or nine, with one
used twice? What do we mean by the word word?
Peter
On Feb 21, 2008, at 3:05 PM, Bruce Despain wrote:
Geoff & Dick,
May I respond?
1) When I said "licensed by the verb" in my post, I
was referring to just such verbs as "arrive" that require the
temporal adverbial, expressed or understood. It seems that with this
understood it is possible to state it as a precondition on your movement
of the temporal adverbial to the fore: that complements be provided
after it. (These are all quite distinct from the adverbial adjunct.)
2) I think that the nouns tomorrow, and today are often adverbial in nature (as in
you examples), and that the adverb now is sometimes used as a noun (as in
"Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their
party."
Bruce
>>> Geoffrey Layton <[log in to unmask]>
02/21/08 12:43 PM >>>
Craig -
I'd like to put this question into the context of an issue that we
seem to continually (although sometimes it seems continuously) confront -
the impact of grammar instruction on writing. From my
perspective, teaching students whether (and how) these phrases function
adverbially would fall under the "grammar instruction has no effect and
perhaps even a negative effect on writing" dictum. Of more
interest to me is the rhetorical effect of starting or ending the sentence with
adverbials, particularly those that communicate WHEN information. For
example, ending the sentence with a WHEN adverbial ("He arrives a
week from Thursday.") effectively ends the sentence, whereas starting the
sentence with an adverbial almost forces the writer to continue writing.
For example, a sentence that starts with WHEN information ("A week
from Thursday he arrives") sounds very unfinished and awkward, but it
has the benefit of forcing the writer to expand the sentence with WHERE
and WHY information: "A week from Thursday, he arrives from San
Francisco to perform as the piano soloist with the Chicago
Symphony." This is how I like to use grammar.
Geoff
Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2008 13:49:59
-0500
From: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Adverb?
To: [log in to unmask]
Craig,
Would all of these be noun phrases functioning adverbially? (This
is a genuine question, not a challenge.)
He arrives a week from Thursday.
He arrives Thursday.
He arrives this afternoon.
He arrives tomorrow.
He arrives today.
He arrives now.
The first three seem to be noun phrases, but what about the last
three?
Dick Veit
________________________________
Richard Veit
Department of English
University of North Carolina Wilmington
From: Assembly for the
Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf OfCraig Hancock
Sent: Thursday, February
21, 2008 12:42 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Adverb?
Bruce,
I wonder about the confusion that might be caused by 3b) below:
"A noun phrase referring to a time period may be called an "adverbial
phrase."" My own tendency would be to say that it is a noun phrase
functioning adverbially within this context. It is also possible for the same
phrase (though it refers to a time period) to act in a different role.
"Last summer was hot." (Last summer as subject). "I hated last
summer." (Last summer as direct object complement of "hated".) I
don't think a noun like "summer" is an adverbial noun outside of
context.
He left home. He went home. The first is transitive, the
second intransitive. The verb has an influence on the functional role.
We also have adverb phrases, like "so quickly" or
"too often." I would call them "adverb phrases" because an
adverb functions as head.
To me, a "phrase" would refer to the internal structure
of the word group. Function (like adverbial) would be somewhat independent of
that.
Craig
Bruce Despain wrote:
Janet,
I think that
explaining "last summer" in your sentence needs to point out a
number of relationships.
1) It is a phrase, in that it
consists of more than a single word.
1a) The (operational)
limiting adjective "last" modifies the noun "summer"
designating a seasonal part of a year.
1b) "Summer" is one
of those nouns that refers to a time period.
2) The phrase functions in
the predicate as temporal modification.
2a) Temporal modification may be
carried out by single words, which are then called "adverbs."
2b) Temporal modification carried out by phrases are called "adverbial
phrases."
3) A noun that refers to a time
period may often be used in the predicate by itself as temporal
modification.
3a) Such nouns are often called
adverbial nouns.
3b) A noun phrase referring to a
time period may be called an "adverbial phrase."
The adverbial phrase in this case
"last summer" is modifying the whole subject-predicate combination
"Reports of flying saucers were frequent." Such phrases have
been called "adverbial adjuncts" in the sense that they are not
licensed by the verb phrase, as many adverbial phrases are. Such phrases
are more freely attached to the sentence, much like sentence adverbs
(never, sometimes, always, immediately, etc.) regularly are.
Bruce
>>> "Castilleja, Janet" <[log in to unmask]> 02/20/08 4:27 PM >>>
How do you guys handle this kind of a sentence:
Reports
of flying saucers were frequent last summer.
Do you
call ‘last summer’ a noun phrase functioning as an adverb or do you
just call it an adverb phrase?
Janet
Castilleja
Heritage University
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