Chapter 1 Grammatical Foundations: Words

1 Language, Grammar and Linguistic Theory

This book attempts to describe some of the basic grammatical characteristics of the English language in a way accessible to most students of English. For this reason we start at the beginning and take as little as possible for granted. Definitions are given for grammatical concepts when they are first used and there is a glossary at the back of the book to remind the reader of these as he or she works through it. At the end of each chapter there are an extensive set of exercises which the student is encouraged to consider and work through either in class or alone. For those students working alone, we have also provided model answers for the exercises. These are for the student to check their understanding of the material supported by the exercises and to offer observations that the student may have missed. The uninitiated student might be surprised to find that there are many ways to describe language, not all compatible with each other. In this book we make use of a particular system of grammatical description based mainly on Government and Binding theory, though it is not our aim to teach this theory and we will very rarely refer to it directly. We use the theory to offer a description of English, rather than using English to demonstrate the theory. We will spend a short amount of time at the beginning of the book to state our reasons for choosing this theory, as opposed to any other, to base our descriptions. Whatever else language might be (e.g. a method of communicating, something to aid thought, a form of entertainment or of aesthetic appreciation) it is first and foremost a system that enables people who speak it to produce and understand linguistic expressions. The nature of this system is what linguistics aims to discover. But where do we look for this system? It is a common sense point of view that language exists in peoples heads. After all, we talk of knowing and learning languages. This also happens to be the belief of the kind of linguistics that this book aims to introduce: in a nutshell, the linguistic system that enables us to speak and understand a language is a body of knowledge which all speakers of a particular language have come to acquire. If this is true, then our means for investigating language are fairly limited we cannot, for instance, subject it to direct investigation, as delving around in someones brain is not only an ethical minefield, but unlikely to tell us very much given our current level of understanding of how the mind is instantiated in the brain. We are left, therefore, with only indirect ways of investigating language. Usually this works in the following way: we study what the linguistic system produces (grammatical sentences which have certain meanings) and we try to guess what it is that must be going on in