A Syntax Sandwich: the Works and the Workings
Introduction -
Phonology gave us rules for forming surface utterances, things we can go over with our students, gauging the need and the age-level. It also helps us understand the history of language. For example, Latin "gravis/grave" is cognate with Sanskrit "guru." It's not readily apparent to the untrained eye, but as you look more into language, and operate under the expectation that some languages are related to one another, this causes you to search out what may be a cognate. In this scenario, we know with some degree of surety, from Romance linguistics, that in Latin and proto-Romance, the alphabetic -v- was rendered /w/ in normal speech. Then we compare Sanskrit again, for whom there were the greatest grammarians the early world ever saw: in India. We will take it that the more composite Latin /grawis/ is closer to the original. It's just a hypothesis, but the metathesis of bilabial /w/ and /r/ in the original to render the stem gur- in Sanskrit (with deletion of /a/ and syllabication of the bilabial into a vowel syllable nucleus) lends us to think we are on to something. The ancient Greek word for heavy, "barys," might just have been related too, and it is even farther afield! It gives us the English "barometer," by the way. There are many such comparisons: take Greek "naus" and Latin "navis;" what do you think they meant? If you guessed boat, or ship, you would be right. These are core Indo-Europeanisms! Syntax resembles phonology in that it is logical, but it is a greater scale than phonology. Syntax is macro, while phonology is micro, and then we are left with morphology, the golden mean! So, syntax is how (words and) morphemes are put together, in a logical sequence and often complex fashion. Just as verbs and nouns can be parsed in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and other inflectional (synthetic) languages, so can a sentence be parsed in English or another language. To parse is to analyze and examine, part by component part. The real keys are the "lexical categories," that is, the parts of speech, as we have discerned them, as grammarians and laypeople alike...in the selfsame boat! Phonology and alphabet need to broached immediately in the classroom, while syntax can wait a few weeks. Not too long, though!
Open-Class Lexical Categories -
The Open Class Parts of Speech in our language are nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs. Sample morphological affixes of import have already been given for nouns, verbs, and adjectives. For adverbs we have the solitary and prominent suffix "-ly," which is derivational. Another couple derivational suffixes for verbs are "-ize" and "-ify." For the purpose of teaching our students, what needs to be taught is that nouns will follow their determiner and adjective. Adjectives follow determiners such as "the", and they follow adverbs too, as in "very fine!" This is all attributive. When an adjective is predicative, it follows the linking verb. There is no ellipsis in English, as in Russian and Latin; in our language one must say the linking verb, or else contract it. It cannot be deleted, however, and it predictably comes at the syntactic center of the sentence, as any verb will. When diagramming, we say that the verb initiates the predicate. This is all part of teacher awareness, and this should not be held back from students. It's possible that syntax needs a modicum of deductive reasoning. Last of all, I will say that adverbs go with a verb or verb complex, either before or after, somewhat whimsically. They can also go along with a sentence, as in ". . .Frankly...." Lastly they can go, as already said, in a fixed way, before an adjective, as an intensfier of some sort. Most adverbs depict time or manner/way.
The English Verb!
Verbs deserve extra time. In school we teach verbal principal parts: run, running, ran, run. Irregular. Then for regular, we have walk, walking, walked, walked. It's the interface of morphology and syntax, in a sense, so it is important to start here. Syntax is more the why, and the bigger picture for the received versions of English, the standard dialects. English is conjugated, and this needs to be brought to students' attention, and gently so, as they integrate new pieces of the puzzle and bits of knowledge. Perhaps an analogy with their own language; many languages conjugate. Some do not, though, and in the end we must always bring it back to English. Before the end, actually. English verbs are conjugated for tense, mood, voice, and aspect. Tense is the time of the sentence event, while mood often focuses on more contingent, less factual wishes and commands, and in these sentences students will see either the subjunctive ("I wish I were there!/If you be good, then....!") or a conditional via modal auxiliary ("might be swimming/could have been going/would be happy"). Voice is two-fold in English. We have passive and active. Active verbs have an agentive doer as the subject of the event, while passive verbs put the agent or doer later in the sentence and the direct object at the front. Sometimes in English (and few other languages), the indirect object can be given equal valor as the subject of a passive sense, thus "I was given a rose by my Peace Corps children." Aspect, which determines the completion of the sentence event, mixes with tense very directly, so that students will see the present perfect contrasting by form with the present progressive. How so? Well, "I have skied," vice "I am skiing." This carries into the pas as well, such that we have a past perfect, or pluperfect formulation, "I had skied," then a variety of incomplete past tenses, such as "I was skiiing," and "We had been skiiing," as if an alibi to a crime! Not to mention "I used to ski," a type of compound imperfective past tense. Another compound tense is the present habitual or emphatic, "I do ski every single day!!" Ski is a transitive verb. Be is the basic intransitive, but there are many others, and some verbs are ditransitive, and take both an indirect and direct object! That's English! A wonderful adventure via the verb. Thanks for joining. Do you have more? Verbs have a distant horizon, and there is much to cover. We have seen the nuggets here. Let us move on. It is essential to note in the field of verbs that tense, aspect, mood, and voice all interact as a composite unity, and they sometimes will conjoin in the sentence, if they are contracted. I'm done for now. I've skied my fill. Won't you please come with me for a bit at the lodge?
Other Parts of Speech
Note the abridgment around the pronoun "I" just before. We call this common effect of language on writing "contraction," a fairly regular process in English and other languages. The other lexical categories in syntax form a closed class. They are pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, determiners, auxiliary or helping verbs, and complementizers. Complementizers are basic words or free morphemes like "that," "whether," and "why." among a few. Complementizers (not complimentizers!) serve a clause (not just a phrase) that functions in object position of a verb; sometimes "that" can be dropped. "I think I've skied enough for today." It is benefitcial to know that personal pronouns have a small declension which can be shown to students. Auxilaries have been touched on above. They occur before and in conjunction with main verbs to indicate tense, aspect, mood, and/or voice. They also function in negations such as "I don't play the clarinet for a living, but I'll go ahead and buy the compact disc, because I enjoy the music!" Conjunctions properly can be coordinating or subordinating varieties, but they essentially connect two clauses. Prepositions can denote many things, but tend to modify verbal or noun phrases when you diagram the sentence for the students. We have talked briefly about determiners. They are common in English before nouns. Remember? They are like the article, both definite and indefinite. Numbers fit therein too, both cardinal and ordinal. Remember, English is spoken in many places, but these tendencies hold true in most places, and across most oceans where it's spoken!! Thanks for tuning in; there will be more. Semantics, that great juggernaut, is next on my agenda. Again, thank you for reading thus far.
Tea with Chomsky
There is always time for Chomsky in linguistics, but in terms of your normal ELL student, Chomsky in reality is largely irrelevant. Chomsky is theory, and ELL's are present in your classroom and mine so as to learn. We luckily have already touched on Chomsky in the phonology "chapter." Chomsky focuses on the layers of language; that is his quintessence. Rules govern the difference between underlying forms of phonology and phonetic representations (all of this in IPA) that are uttered. The same thing goes for syntax. When you think about the sentence, "the person whom I saw at the theater yesterday...," the idea comes to mind that "whom" is a direct object of a relative clause, which is the latter parts of the sentence fragment I have laid out for you to contemplate. the second thing that pops to mind is, why is the "whom" not placed after its predicate and transitive verb "saw?" Well, for Chomsky, the answer is this: at deep structure, the direct object of the verb in question is indeed after the verb, but it has been lifted to the top of its relative clause, drawn to the "modified" nominal word (noun) "person." Does that makes sense? It is only part of the picture, but it is the gist. Most linguistics ascribe to this type of "generative linguistics," be it syntax or phonology. It is a useful tool, but for ELL's, I stick with diagramming, which does not pretend to be more than a tool. Chomsky has tied all of his theory together into a knot called Universal Grammar, or the Language Acquisition Device.
Not all agree with Chomsky in the linguistic circles. Many take a more pragmatic approach. Philip Lieberman and Sheila Blumstein have taken rather more evolutionary take in their own work at Brown University. For them, there can be no biological predisposition, as such. The brain is too complex for a single biological "mechanism" such as what Universal Grammar and deep structure affords and necessitates in Chomsky's work. For Lieberman and Blumstein and their work, I refer you initially to a book of Cambridge University Press: Speech Physiology, Speech Perception, and Acoustic Phonetics. Chomsky is referred to in this book. I refer yo to pages 203-204 for a cursory look at this linguistic approach, for which there is, philosophically, no "a priori" human linguistic "norm," or set of toggles as dictated by U.G. The first printing of the book is 1988, and the arguments are powerful. Most linguistic folk, however, follow Chomsky, and it must be said, Chomsky accounts well for things linguistic! If U.G. is to be discerned, more work must be done by all.