rangkuman

English Sentence Analysis and introductory course by Marjolijn Vespoor and Kim Sauter university of Groningen 

1. Sentences: Communicative, functions and typical patterns.

In this book, we will concentrate mainly on a rather formal, standard, written variety, not only because this is the variety that we will come across most in academic books and articles, but especially because it is more carefully thought about before put on paper and therefore does not show the kinds of gaps and unfinished sentences that may occur in spoken language.In this chapter, we will first take a look at sentences in general to narrow down our object of analysis, then we will introduce you to the basic constituents of a sentence, and finally we will show you how these may or may not be combined in typical sentence patterns.

1.2 Declarative, Interogative, Imperative, and Exclamatory sentence patterns. 

Sentences: Communicative functions and typical patterns

to inform someone of something

to get information from someone to get someone to do something

to express one's attitude about something

Each of these communicative functions has a typical sentence pattern:

John is leaving.

Is John leaving?

Leave!

How awful John is leaving! What a shock John is leaving!

These patterns have the following syntactic characteristics:

subject-whole verb

part of verb-subject-rest of verb

verb by itself

How... or What a... followed by remainder of sentence

These sentence types with these tterns are named as follows:

declarative

interrogative

imperative

exclamatory

1.2Declarative, interrogative, imperative and exclamatory sentence patterns

Say the words "John is leaving" in such a way that it expresses the following communi cative functions:

informing

asking for information

getting someone to do something

expressing feeling/attitude

1.3 Participants, process, attributes, and settings.

The little boy is Happy (a quality)

He turned three years old (characteristic)

He must be Annie's little brother (identification)

He was a toddler (class membership)

Besides naming participants and attributes of these participants, the speaker may choose to give information about the setting, which tells how, where, when, why, under what condition, in spite of which condition the process or the event or situation takes place. The term 'setting' is to be taken very broadly. It may refer to time, reason, condition, cause and so on. Basically it refers to anything that is not a participant, an attribute or a process.

1.4 Subject, predicator, object, and adverbial

So far we have talked about the roles different sentence parts may name in a sentence. A group of words used to name a particular role has a technical function in the sentence.

Roles and functions of sentence constituents

Roles                    function          abbrevation

First participant   subject                    S

Process                predicator                P

Something about    subject attribute   SA

First participant

a second participant   direct object    DO

Something about

The second participant  object attribute OA

A third participant  indirect object            IO

                                 Benefactive object     BO

To summarize, main participants, which tell us who or what, are subjects, direct objects, or indirect objects. The part that names the process is called the predicator, and characteris tics of one of the participants are called attributes. Finally, those parts of the sentence that tell us when, why, how, and so on are called adverbials.

         S                       P                             

The mother / had given the boy/ 

      DO                  A

a balloon/for his birthday.

            S             P           SA                A

The little boy/was/ very proud/yesterday.

1.5 typical sentence Patterns

Now let's look at the previous utterances in a recognizable pattern.

The subject andpredicate have been separated with a slash.

           Subject                         predicate

The language we use / not only expresses ideas but also shapes our thinking.

 The predicate, turn, contains the predicator, consisting of one or more words denot ing the process. The predicator may be followed by a complement, which is a superord

inate term for the objects or attributes, which name other participants or attributes of participants that are necessary to complete the meaning of the predicator. In the following example, the correlative conjunction not only...but also is set off with parentheses because it does not have a function in the sentence. It merely con

nects the two predicates.

1.6 same verb, differenct patterns.

Although there are typical verbs for typical sentence patterns, many verbs may be used in several patterns. Especially, the verb make has several distinct senses.

S        P                   SA

He  makes a good coach. make used in brings patter

S     P        DO

He  made  a goal. make used in doing/seing pattern.

S      P         BO     DO

He    made  him   a cake. make used in giving/buying patterns

S      P          DO      DA

He    made    him    president. make used in making/considering pattern.

1.7 English word order.

In order to be able to analyze sentences, you should be aware of a few more facts about the sentence constituents and their patterns. First of all, English word order is quite rigid. Almost always the subject comes first, then the predicator, etc. One way to find out whether a sentence part is a subject or not is to make the sentence into a question. The subject will appear after the first verb:

He told me to add one tablespoon of honey per pound of fruit. Did he tell me...?

We spread a thin layer of fruit on each plate. Did we spread...?

The only constituent that may occur in many different places is an adverbial. Especially one-word adverbials like not, always, and often may occur almost anywhere in the sentence. In order to see if a sentence part is an adverbial or not, see if it is possible to move it in the sentence.

Last week Michael showed us how to prepare a 'fruit leather'. Michael showed us how to prepare a 'fruit leather last week.

He used plastic wrap to cover the plates.

To cover the plates, he used plastic wrap.

2. Sentence (simple, compound, and complex)

In Chapter 1 we talked about different types of sentences, but what is a sentence? The term sentence is derived from Latin sententia, which literally meant 'feeling' or 'opin ion'. In the field of grammar, this meaning has specialized to mean 'an utterance that expresses a feeling or opinion, but a more technical definition would be a grammati cally self-contained speech unit consisting of a word, or a syntactically related group of words that expresses an assertion, a question, a command, a wish, or an exclamation, which in h in writing usually begins with a capital letter and ends with a period, question mark, or exclamation mark.

Sentence types

A simple sentence consist of one main clause only. However, this does not mean that the sentence has to be very short. The following is an example of a long sentence that is simple because it does not contain any dependent clauses. Even the last adverbial is not a full dependent clause because it does not start with a subordinator and it does not have a full verb (which will be discussed in Chapter 3).

        B                    P 

The waiterss/are baking/in the sun/like a herd of skinned seats.

                                A

Their pinky brown hodies shining with oil.

Compound Sentences

A compound sentence consists of two or more main clauses. The sentence Whales cannot breathe under water for they have lungs instead of gills is an example of a compound sentence because both clauses are independent and may stand on their own. The connecting word for, which expresses reason, connects these two clauses and expresses what these two situations have to do with each other.

Whales cannot breathe under water, for they have lungs instead of gills.

They have lungs instead of gills, for whales cannot breathe under water.

Cordinate conjuctions ( and, for, but, so, or, yet, nor)

Correlative conjuctions (both, and, not only, but also, either, or, neither, nor)

Whales have lungs instead of gills; therefore, they cannot breathe under water.

* Therefore, they cannot breathe under water; whales have lungs instead of gills.

Coordinate conjunctions and conjunctive adverbs have rather similar meanings; for example, both and and moreover express addition and both so and therefore express result, but they are different grammatically. Unlike a coordinate conjunction, a conjunctive adverb can be moved within the second clause:

Whales have lungs instead of gills; they therefore cannot breathe under water.

Whales have lungs instead of gills; they can therefore not breathe under water.

Whales have lungs instead of gills, so they cannot breathe under water.

* Whales have lungs instead of gills, they can so not breathe under water.

Compound-complex sentences

It is also possible to have a compound sentence with complex parts, or a complex sentencewith compound parts. We will call both types compound-complex sentences. The following example of a compound-complex sentence has two complete main clauses connected by the coordinate conjunction and. Each of these has a dependent clause.

This type of clause is called a relative or adjective clause, which will be dealt with more in Chapter 6. One way to test to see if a clause is a relative clause is to leave it off. If what remains is still a complete sentence with a full subject and predicate, then it is likely that the dependent clause is a relative one.

John, who always kicks the ball hard,

is the player who scores the most. John, who always kicks the ball hard, is the player who scores the most.

The third type of dependent clause functions as subject, object, or subject attribute of a sentence, and since these are necessary parts of a sentence, there is no complete main clause left when they are left off. One way to tell if the dependent clause functions as subject or object is to replace the whole clause with the word it.

3. Verbs

In the previous chapters we looked at different types of sentences and clauses as a whole. Now we will focus on smaller parts of sentences and clauses. In Chapter 1, you saw that a sentence may have several constituents: subject, (S), predicator (P), complement (DO, IO, BO, SA, OA) and adverbial(s) (A).

      S           P            ID        DO          A

Marry/has written/him/a letter/everyday

Each of the sentence constituents has a function in the sentence. The subject and objects name the main participants in an event or situation; the subject attribute or object attribute say something about the subject or object. Adverbials give information about the setting, when, where, how, and so on. The predicator names the process (action or state of being) in which the subject is involved.

When we call a group of words a subject or predicator, we name its function, that is

we say what it does in the sentence and how it relates to the other parts of the sentence. But when we say subject or predicator, we do not say what it is made of. The technical term for 'what it is made of is realized. Each sentence constituent is made up of one or more words, which together can form either a certain type of phrase or a certain type of clause.

Lexical versus auxiliary verbs

There are two kinds of verbs: lexical and auxiliary verbs. The lexical verb, also called main verb, names the process taking place. It has the most 'meaning'. It may occur in several forms: write(s), wrote, written, writing, and (to) write. For a simple sentence or a clause to be meaningful it must have a lexical verb, and if the verb phrase has more than one verb, it comes last.

Auxiliary verbs also called helping verbs, are the verbs in front of the lexical verb that help indicate when the process takes place, will take place, r took place or how the whole process is looked upon by the speaker. Common helping verbs are be, have, be

able to, do, will, would, can, could, may, might and so on.

Finite versus non-finite verb forms

For sentence analysis, it is actually sufficient to recognize the predicator (verb phrase and its lexical verb), but verbs may be used in many positions in the sentence. Compare the following sentences, all with different uses of walking. Only in the last sentence is walking part of the predicator..

Walking ia good for you. walking is used a subject 

The walking doll irritates me . Modifier to doll

I am walking  to work every day to stay in shpae  . as part of the predicator.

Auxiliary verbs

As you saw above, the lexical verb by itself names a process such as 'write', 'go', "buy", and so on, but the verb phrase as a whole gives us a lot more information. By using a different tense or a helping verb, we can express differences in how an event or

situation is viewed.

Compare the following sets of sentences with just a simple verb phrase, consisting

of only one verb, which is a lexical one in a finite form.

The men are muddy and exhausted. The men were muddy and exhausted.

simple present tense simple past tense

The difference between these sentences is that the lexical verb be has a different finite form. The verb in the first sentence has a present finite form, which places the situa tion in the present, and the other sentence a past finite form, which places the situationat a moment before the moment of speaking.