Introduction

The approach taken to grammar in Chapters Five and Six is descriptive. In other words, it sets out to describe some of the possible patterns of English sentences without prescribing correct use.

These chapters do not attempt to describe all possible English sentence patterns. This is a monumentally large task, and has been carried out in great depth in works dedicated to a full description of English grammar. Examples of such works are A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Lan­ guage by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik, and The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language by Rodney Huddlestone and Geoffrey K Pullum.

This chapter gives only a brief overview of some of the most important elements of English sentences, and some of the ways in which these elements may be combined.

Word Groupings

The concept of word grouping was introduced in Chapter Five. It is an important concept, and underlies much of the discussion in this chapter.

However, as Akmajian et al (1984:168) point out, the fact that sentences are divided into groups of words is not obvious and cannot always be directly observed. The following sentence illustrates this point:

It is not immediately obvious that the words in this sentence are arranged in groups. At first, the sentence may seem to be merely a sequence of words in a particular order.

When we look at the meaning of the sentence, however, we see that it is ambiguous. In other words, it has two possible meanings. The sentence is either about one person (the mother of both the boy and the girl), or else it is about two people (the mother of the boy and, in addition, a second person, the girl). There is nothing about the words themselves that is ambiguous, so the ambiguity must be the result of the ways in which the words can be grouped.

The fact that there are two possible meanings for this sentence indicates that the words in it may be grouped together in two different ways, even when these groups cannot be observed directly. The words in the sentence may be grouped as follows: