TJ,
One correction from below. The "mood element" is not finite and
lexical, but finite verb plus grammatical subject. "He does" is
sufficient for a sentence because it includes both, as does "Does he"?
I am not the right person to ask about R/K diagrams, though I
remember them fondly from what we used to call "Junior High."
Different terminology can widen the communication gaps. It's
unfortunate that grammar is treated in so many different camps and each
has its own way of naming things. I have trouble thinking of past
perfect as a tense because I share the currently mainstream view (in
linguistics) that there are only two tenses in English and that
"perfect" is not tense, but aspect. The fact that it often occurs
independently of tense is one manifestation of that. (I brought the
finished book to the library.)
Craig
On 1/6/2011 10:40 AM, Craig Hancock wrote:
> TJ,
> No need to apologize. Here are roughly the explanations I use with my
> students.
> The lexical verb is what you look up in the dictionary to see what it
> means. It always comes last. ("Has been manipulating" includes the
> lexical verb "manipulate".) Lexical verbs also carry transitivity
> (transitive, intransitive, and so on) and govern the kinds of
> complements that will show up in the predicate (direct object, indirect
> object and so on.)
> The finite verb is what moves to the front of the clause when we want
> to ask a question. "Has Paul been manipulating us?" Finite verb plus
> lexical verb create the "mood element," which is what determines
> whether we are predicating a statement, asking a question, and so
> forth. Simple present and simple past can carry finite, but they lose
> that (it splits out) in question form. "She leaves soon. Does she leave
> soon?" In question form,"leaves" becomes "leave" because it is the
> finite that carries the burden of subject/verb agreement. (The modals
> are invariant.) The finite is very much what Langacher calls a
> "grounding element." It's a huge key to grounding a statement within
> discourse, whether we assert that something happens, has happened, may
> happen, should happen, is being imagined as happening, and so on. A
> non-finite clause is not grounded in that way and is therefore not
> something we can agree or disagree with.
> Grammaticalization is something that the functional and cognitive
> linguists talk about quite a bit because they see grammar (rightly, I
> think) as emergent, as both sustained by use and arising out of use.
> The modals, as Herb has pointed out, have become part of the syntax
> but were once just regular verbs. A phrase like "am going to" has
> grammaticalized as a predictor ("I will leave" and "I am going to
> leave" are now similar) fairly recently.
> If you think of grammar as a fixed set of rules (possibly innate), then
> grammaticalization may come as a surprise. Frequency creates a
> stability, but a dynamic one.
> I'm flying to Pittsburgh this afternoon and so will see my email
> sporadically through the weekend. I look forward to the continuation of
> this thread.
>
> Craig
>
>
>
>> grammar
>> in universities somehow didn't prepare me very well. Phrases such
>> as "lexical verbs" and "grammaticalized" and (your use of) "finite"
>> don't work for me. Out of curiosity, how would R/K diagramming
>> handle what I'm thinking of as perfect tenses?
>>
>> tj
>>
>>
>>
>>
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