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One Day in the Life of the English Language
A Microcosmic Usage Handbook
By Frank L. Cioffi PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-6575-8
CHAPTER 1
Actants, Actions, Ongoing States: Nouns, Verbs, and the Sentences They Form
Why Learn the Parts of Speech?
Nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions—isn't all this just mumbo jumbo? Words just stand for things, right? So why bother with all this jargon?
In Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift deals with this very issue. The "scientists" in part 3 of his 1726 novel have worked out a curious system of communication: people can carry around objects that they can show one another and thus mutely communicate. Speaking words wears out the lungs, the scientists have concluded. No need for multiple parts of speech here—people just show each other objects (nouns) and get their ideas across through those things. Only "women ... the vulgar and illiterate ... the common people" rebel against this innovation. Swift's joke is that nouns can't convey meaning by themselves, so using the system burdens one with donkey-loads of items.
Here is how he describes it:
The other project was a scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever.... since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express a particular business they are to discourse on. And this invention would certainly have taken place, to the great ease as well as health of the subject, if the women, in conjunction with the vulgar and illiterate, had not threatened to raise a rebellion, unless they might be allowed the liberty to speak with their tongues, after the manner of their forefathers; such constant irreconcilable enemies to science are the common people. However, many of the most learned and wise adhere to the new scheme of expressing themselves by things, which has only this inconvenience attending it, that if a man's business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged in proportion to carry a greater bundle of things upon his back, unless he can afford one or two strong servants to attend him. I have often beheld two of those sages almost sinking under the weight of their packs, like pedlars among us; who, when they met in the street, would lay down their loads, open their sacks, and hold conversation for an hour together; then put up their implements, help each other to resume their burdens, and take their leave. (Swift)
The joke is that in a materialistic culture, the things that people own speak louder than what they say. As we acquire more stuff, we become more communicatively burdened or blocked—less articulate, maybe less human.
It's also fairly clear that whatever "communicating" is taking place has to be fairly primitive. From a linguistic perspective, the whole project of communicating through only nouns would be limiting, if not impossible. Swift's scientists have engineered a ridiculous method: that's also what makes the passage funny. In English, fortunately, words are not just denotations of things. We use words for action, for joining, for emphasis, for description, and even for abstract ideas. Perhaps wealthy "sages" don't have to do too much communicating and have all the time in the world, but the rest of us regular folks, Swift's "common people," don't. So we need multiple parts of speech.
Naturally this leads to the complications inherent in language use, which Swift's "sages" seem to be rebelling against. One of the problems with parts of speech, for example, is that we can't definitively divide up the dictionary into nouns, verbs, adjectives, and the like. Words find their ways into multiple categories. Any noun can probably be a verb, at least in some context: almost every day on my New Jersey Transit train, I hear the announcement, "The last car will not platform at New Brunswick," using a new verb, to platform, which means to stop at a place where, when the doors open, a platform will be right there, level with the floor of the railroad car. An example I recently heard on the radio also comes to mind. A man who bought his mother's old car complained about how much he had to pay her: he said, "My mom bluebooked me on the car" ("My Big Break"). (And, curiously, many verb-derived words, called "verbals," function as nouns, or as adjectives, for that matter.)
Some linguists don't see the parts of speech as being as separate and distinct as I do (or as distinct as perhaps you were taught). Rather, they envision nouns, verbs, prepositions, and the like as existing on a "quasi-continuum." This view, put forth in the 1970s by John Robert Ross, is sometimes called "squish grammar" or "fuzzy grammar," and in it Ross posits a kind of hierarchy of parts of speech: verb—participles—adjectives—prepositions—nouns:
Proceeding along the hierarchy is like descending into lower and lower temperatures, where the cold freezes up the productivity of syntactic rules, until at last nouns, the ultimate zero of this space, are reached. (317)
Verbs have many tenses and forms (conjugations), while nouns can be only singular or plural. Ross concludes that "the distinction between V[erbs], A[djectives], and N[ouns] is one of degree, rather than of kind" (326), an idea that you might find persuasive and possibly helpful in terms of envisioning how the language works.
To give you some idea of how slippery all these categories are, let's look again at "Garden Path Sentences," which I introduced above. These are confusing, leading the reader down the wrong path, often because the reader misapprehends key words' parts of speech. In the sentence "The old man the boat," for example, most readers take in the first three words as article, adjective, noun, and expect the next part of the sentence to be about what the old man does. But the sentence should be taken in as article, noun, verb, with the meaning "The old people make up the crew of the boat."
Here's the key: you need to figure out how words fulfill varying duties within a sentence. You need to intuitively grasp the inner workings of the English sentence.
While I can't cover every case, every nuance of the language (I refer you to Jespersen, Quirk et al., or Huddleston and Pullum for authoritative and complete guides), I can urge you to scrutinize more self-consciously both your own sentences and those of others. Seeing sentences as composed of various elements that work and interconnect in clearly established and logical patterns will, I hope, transform the way you envision and use language. But the goal isn't to make you into a pedantic nitpicker; instead, it's to help you see and internalize the patterns of the English sentence. I want to sharpen your understanding of the language you produce and the language you encounter, to make you a better listener, and to enhance your writing's communicativeness, exactness, and power.
Fundamentals
Nouns
Definition: Typically defined as "a word for a person, place, or thing," a noun is usually the easiest kind of word to add to your vocabulary in a language. Remember that a "thing" might be an abstract concept, that is, something intangible, imaginary, or even nonexistent: liberty, hatred, righteousness, hell, nirvana.
Verbs
Definition: A verb is usually described as a word denoting action. Verbs can also show a state of existence (with a to be verb, such as am, are, is, was, were, been, being) or possession (variations of to have). The International Herald Tribune article "Pardon of Jailed Official Angers Sarkozy's Foes" includes the following sentence, whose verbs denote slow-motion, offstage-sounding action, but action just the same:
Jean-Charles Marchiani, 65, helped free French hostages in Lebanon in the 1980s and Bosnia in the 1990s, and served in the European parliament and as a governor in the south of France. (Derschau)
Helped free and served constitute the "action" of this sentence. Verbs can be words of "action" that's internal, action that is metaphoric, action that doesn't involve movement, or action that takes place over a long period of time.
Verbs embody and depict events taking place, incidents occurring, states of mind, and states of being. They show, as if filmically, what happens, is happening, happened, will happen, could happen, would happen. They also can "link" one noun to another or to an adjective, setting up a rough equivalence.
Nouns and Verbs Together
Typically a noun and verb work together to create a sentence. But the noun has to function as a subject, and the verb must function as a predicate. The noun has to be the entity doing the action or existing, while the verb enacts what that noun is doing.
We know we have a full sentence via something called "sentence sense," a term that some teachers and writers use, suggesting that recognizing a sentence is like smelling, feeling, tasting, hearing, seeing, or balance: it can't be taught; it's almost instinctive, innate. It's sort of a seventh sense.
Here is one way to envision a sentence: If you enter a crowded room, and you have only a brief window of time to speak (i.e., a short interval during which everyone will momentarily hush and listen to you), what kind of utterance should you make? Only a full sentence will effectively convey a relatively clear and complete idea. This could be simply an interjection—" Yes!!"—or it could be an imperative (command), such as "Get out!" or "Party!" all of which are complete without additional sentence elements. Were you to shout something that could not be construed as a sentence, it would probably provoke puzzlement or laughter: "Mxyzptlk!" And a declaration such as "Among!" or "Perhaps!" might have some limited communicative value, though I'm not sure either would convey a "relatively clear or complete idea" to a roomful of people. Perhaps this marks a limit to the crowded room scenario.
Think of a sentence as a Stand-Alone Linguistic Unit of Thought or Expression: a SALUTE. In what I am calling a "typical sentence," a "SALUTE," you need a subject (note that in the command form this is implied: "[You] get out!"); you need a verb working with that subject; and that verb needs to have a tense: past, present, or future (or a perfective variant, i.e., with had, has, or have). But remember, the sentence has to be a SALUTE. It's something that might depend on antecedent or subsequent language, but it does not have to do so. While it is almost always offered within the context of a paragraph, a book, a speech, a conversation, it's also independent, self-contained, and nearly autonomous.
Short Sentences Often Acceptable
Sentences can be very short yet still "full" and correct. Here, actress Keri Russell describes the house her husband renovated (and also describes her husband himself):
"It's so beautiful. He's such a stud. It's done.... And he did it." (Freydkin)
These three sentences are all complete ones, even though they are only between two and four words long.
Standard Pattern of English Sentences
In English, sentences most often take a subject-verb-object pattern. Thus the listener or reader usually knows—right away—who or what is doing the action, as in this headline:
Online Piracy Menaces Pro Sports (Arango)
Online piracy functions as the subject in the sentence. What is it doing? The headline makes it clear. Online piracy menaces. And what does it menace? Pro sports.
Interestingly, even though nonnative speakers might jumble word order, they usually still retain the subject and verb. In "Tajiks Bleed in a Xenophobic Russia," a Tajik is quoted:
"No, never I go," he said in English, walking through the mud in the village to a relative's house to repay a debt his dead brother owed. (Tavernise)
This Tajik man's meaning is evident, perhaps because he keeps subject and verb close together, even retaining the subject-verb order.
I think it's true that many people dismiss your ideas if you don't couch them in accurate language. But as a listener, you should not yourself engage in such behavior. Even if someone speaks very heavily accented or imperfect English, he or she often has something of great value and/ or insight to impart. My advice is paradoxical, perhaps: while others might not be listening, you should be. You must listen beyond and through the errors—always keeping in mind that others might not be listening beyond or through your errors.
To make Star Trek's Klingons sound more alien, the linguist who invented their language used an object-verb-subject pattern (Zimmer). And Star Wars's gnomic Yoda always started with the verb or object. Chad Hagy offers a good analysis of Yoda's sentence structure:
In most of his phrases, he begins with the verb that we would normally put in the middle of the sentence. He then ends the sentence with the words that we would typically begin the sentence with. So, for example, the phrase "You will be a great Jedi" becomes "Be a great Jedi, you will."
This deviation from standard English sentence structure is supposed to evince the workings of Yoda's strange but wise and otherworldly mind.
Subject-Verb Agreement
In the introduction, I briefly alluded to the complexity and slipperiness of subject-verb agreement. Some verb forms are used for plural subjects, others for singular subjects. Some are for what we call "first person" (to go with I or [plural] we), "second person" (to go with you, singular or plural), or "third person" (to go with he, she, it, or [plural] they). On the surface, this seems very straightforward.
Consider, for example, the forms of the verb to be in the present tense (see below). You need to use the form of the verb that matches (or "agrees with") the subject of your sentence. For example, you would never say, "They am here." Of course, few writers or speakers make mistakes like that. (Or do they? Just recently I noted a graffito on Twenty-Third Street in New York City: "My love you!" What kind of thought does that represent? Is something missing? Your what love me? Or is it saying, "I love you!" Seems a significant distinction. I mean, if I'm an object of love, I really want to know from whom.)
Subject-verb agreement has great importance because it reinforces as it clarifies your meaning. And when the verb is somewhat distant from the subject, that verb's form should recall to the reader whether the subject is singular or plural.
Nonagreement of subject and verb, though, is not only confusing but also stigmatizing: it marks you as being insufficiently attentive to your language, maybe even someone who's forgotten the subject of the sentence by the time you come to the verb: a good thing, this is not.
Fine Tuning
Subject-Verb Agreement with Indefinite Pronouns
The indefinite pronounsneither and no one take singular verbs, though they may seem conceptually plural.
But none proves trickier. Most editors, including those at USA Today (from which the following is taken), accept a plural verb after none, and I think they are right to do so here. Using the plural rarely interferes with clarity and often makes more sense, since the none often refers to a multiplicity of people, entities, or things.
Five films opened nationwide over the weekend, and four beat expectations. None, though, were bigger than Marley, which had been expected to come in third place. (Bowles)
Many English teachers and editors will say that this should read, "None, though, was bigger," because none is equivalent to no one, which takes a singular verb. This is a convenient explanation, but it's simply not always true: sometimes none means "not any," the case in the example sentence, and not any conveys plurality.
Sometimes, though, none means "not a single, solitary one," and the writer wants to emphasize this fact. In that case, none should take a singular verb, as in "None is boring," my revision (in the introduction) of a critic's assessment of an Avedon photograph exhibition.
The indefinite pronouns some or any may take either a singular or a plural verb, depending on whether they refer to just one thing or to more than one.
Subject-Verb Agreement When Prepositions Intervene
Often a prepositional phrase (a phrase beginning with a preposition, a word like for, with, from, about, or the like—see glossary for a more complete list) intervenes between subject and verb. When determining whether the verb should be singular or plural, though, you need to go back to the subject itself, ignoring the material in the prepositional phrase. Prepositional phrases like in addition to, as well as, in combination with, or along with provide only weak jointures, ones that lack the solidity of and. Thus they can't pluralize a singular subject.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from One Day in the Life of the English Language by Frank L. Cioffi. Copyright © 2015 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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