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Patrick Chi-wai LEE

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Understanding English Grammar: A Linguistic Introduction by Thomas E. Payne

by Thomas E. Payne

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Patrick Chi-wai LEE said: " Book Reviewer: by Patrick Chi-wai LEE (1818 words)
Book Name: Understanding English Grammar: A Linguistic Introduction　
Author: Thomas E. Payne
Publisher and Publication Year: New York: Cambridge University Press (2011)
On the book blurb, the author expl Book Reviewer: by Patrick Chi-wai LEE (1818 words)
Book Name: Understanding English Grammar: A Linguistic Introduction　
Author: Thomas E. Payne
Publisher and Publication Year: New York: Cambridge University Press (2011)
On the book blurb, the author explicitly stated that this book is “the essential grammar toolkit for students of English language and linguistics and future teachers of English as a Second Language”. This book also aims “to answer the questions students find most challenging about English grammar, and “to promote students’ understanding through carefully chosen examples from familiar contexts”. This book consists of 433 pages with an Introduction and 15 chapters namely History, Typology, The lexicon, Morphology, Participant reference, Basic concepts in English syntax, Advanced concepts in English syntax, Complementation, Modification, Auxiliaries and the ‘black hole’ of English syntax, Time and reality, Voice and valence, Clause combining, Pragmatic grounding and pragmatically marked constructions.
In Introduction, the author firstly highlights fundamental notions about English grammar. Specifically, he states that language including English is a very efficient tool for communication, and meaning is conveyed and inferred comprehensively after taking into account all levels of linguistic structure and context at the same time, and this clearly also points to the flow of ideas covering the last chapter of ‘pragmatically marked constructions’.
In chapter 1 History, this is said to be a not very typical topic coverage in most commonly used English Grammar book. The history of English language is mentioned by the author as a ‘tapestry’ consisting of four major threads: the Celtic thread, The Anglo-Saxon thread, The Scandinavian thread, and The Latin thread. The reason of covering this history part is believed to be highly related to further rigorous discussion on “the tendency for morphology to simplify, syntax to rigidify, and vocabulary to multiply”, and English has this heritage of ‘mixed’ language.
In chapter 2 Typology, the author particularly discusses the linguistic typology of Modern English. Obviously, the author focuses on three layers of typology embedded in Modern English, including morphological typology (a fairly isolating language), word order typology (VO constituent order), and lexical typology (very robust vocabulary, manner of motion, causation, etc.). This chapter is more into the field of linguistics, and this is strongly believed to be very useful or inspiring to students who may not have heard such core linguistics notions which shaped the English language.
In chapter 3 The lexicon, the major classification is between grammatical functors (i.e. function words) and full lexical words (i.e. content words). This chapter lists out eight classic categories of lexical items including nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, auxiliaries, prepositions, pronouns and conjunctions. Overall, students are believed to find this part easier to comprehend as those classifications appear to be very familiar to students when learning English grammar. The category ‘auxiliaries’ is found to be highlighted here, whereas article or determiner as one commonly-accepted function word is however not focused.
In chapter 4 Morphology – the shape of words, the author discusses some core terms used in linguistic morphology, for instance, word, morpheme, root, stem, bound and free morphemes. Traditionally, the two types of morphology, inflectional and derivational, across world languages are covered. To a linguistics student, the above topics are basic and should be included. To those students who primarily aim to learn English grammar, they may not fully understand the significance of understanding those types of morphology.
In chapter 5 Participant reference, this actually focuses different types of nouns and pronouns as they carry a participant role, no matter in a subject or an object syntactic position. Hence, the author uses the notion of ‘participant reference’, rather than simply a noun. Expectedly, the covered topics in this chapter include types of nouns and pronouns (i.e. proper names vs common names, countable vs non-countable nouns, collective nouns; personal pronouns, Wh-pronouns, demonstrative pronouns, impersonal pronouns, indefinite and qualified pronouns, etc.). The author also highlights ‘cases’ in a linguistic sense, covering a nominative case for a subject, an accusative case for an object in English language, and even more detailed case classification such as oblique and genitive cases. This type of content coverage is inclined to be linguistic-oriented when learning English grammar.
In chapter 6 Actions, states, and process, this focuses on important functional domains of expressing actions, states, and processes. This is basically about the verb functions and verb-like constructions. The author highlights the importance of understanding different ‘semantic roles’ and how semantic roles are aligned with the core grammatical relations (e.g. subject, object, indirect objects, etc.). Specifically, in this chapter, English verbs are grouped into numerous semantic sub-classes such as States (e.g. is), Motion (e.g. come), Sensation (e.g. feel), Cognition (e.g. believe), etc. This perspective viewing different English verbs is not like the traditional classifications of transitive and intransitive verbs, in terms of grammatical relations between a verb and an object. This semantic approach to English verbs is in fact another common approach to language analysis, but it is different from a structural approach. Students may not be that clear about the ‘shift’ from firstly focusing on a structural approach employed in the previous chapters to this chapter having semantic-oriented analysis on English verbs.
In chapter 7 Basic concepts in English syntax, this part firstly discusses various notions about syntax namely linear order, constituency, and hierarchical structure. With a universal grammar approach to English grammar, five syntactical terms including syntactic head, the determining function, complementation, grammatical relations and predication are also discussed. This chapter is said to cover basic concepts, but some concepts are believed to be abstract and not that easy to comprehend for a beginner of learning English grammar. Specifically, when on drawing syntactic tree diagrams for ambiguous sentence structures (e.g. A boy saw a man with a telescope), a beginner English grammar learner may find that difficult.
Further to chapter 7, this is chapter 8 Advanced concepts in English syntax. Three specific hypotheses related to syntactic analysis of English are introduced. The first one is the DP (determiner phrase) hypothesis, the next one is GP (genitive phrase) hypothesis and the last one is the IP (inflection phrase) hypothesis. The author also clearly states that the GP hypothesis is less central. Not surprisingly, students are believed to find IP hypothesis difficult as this firstly is related to different notions (e.g. present, past, continuous, etc.) related to morphology (e.g. -s, -ed, -ing), and secondly this is even shaped in different layers with more than one inflectional morphemes (e.g. has be-en work-ing), etc.
Chapter 9 Complementation primarily covers syntactic functions of Complementation closely, including subject and object complements. Complements are clearly distinguished from Modifiers as the first one is obligatory whereas the latter one is optional with respect to a syntactic structure. In addition, different sub-types of subject and object clauses are introduced and they include stative and inchoative, and those terms appear to be ‘new concepts’ to students if they simply aim to write error-free English.
Chapter 10 Modification is another part focusing on optional constituents of a sentence, particularly contrasting the previous chapter of Complementation which is an obligatory constituent. The author further classifies modifications into numerous types, ranging from modification in noun phrases, modification in predicates to modification at the clause level. Specifically, several semantic roles presented by the modifiers are further highlighted (e.g. the manner, means, purposes, reason, time, locations, etc.). The notions of complementation and modification appear to be easy to comprehend, but students may also have difficulties to distinguish one from another (e.g. I dropped my glass on the ground vs I put my glass on the ground).
In Chapter 11 Auxiliaries and the ‘black hole’ of English syntax, the author highlights few types of auxiliaries namely plain modal auxiliaries, semi-auxiliaries, and inflectable auxiliaries. The Inflectional position - occurring between the subject and the predicate of a basic clause is stated by the author as a black hole because this is argued to be “so powerful a pivot for English syntax that it metaphorically sucks unsuspecting verbs into itself and turns them into auxiliaries”. This again appears to be very abstract to students who may not grasp what the black hole means and this term itself is already a highly technical term to people in general.
In Chapter 12 Time and reality, two such systems, tense and aspects, relate to the dimension of time, while the ‘mode’ relates to the dimension of reality. The aspect system refers to ‘an expression of the internal temporal ‘shape’ of a situation’, and this has been a difficult topic for students as they mostly mix up the notions ‘tense’ with ‘aspect’ as it is like –ed in “I have complet-ed my task”. Mode is described by the author as ‘an expression of the speaker’s commitment to the situation’s truth, likelihood or necessity’, and this technical term is believed to be used in a linguistic sense.
The next one is Chapter 13 Voice and valence. Voice (passive vs active) is not new to students whereas valence is. The author explicitly states that semantic valence refers to ‘the number of central participants in a discourse world scene’, and grammatical valence refers to ‘the number of core arguments in linguistic expressions of those scenes’. The above is on two perspectives: discourse and language, and there are even more notions related to voice and valence. They include: valence-increasing constructions vs valence-decreasing constructions. (e.g. passive voice and impersonal constructions, object omission, object incorporation, etc. vs causatives, dative shift, etc.). There are more to be further discussed such as reflexive, reciprocal and middle constructions.
The author, in this Chapter 14 Clause combining, mainly focuses on constructions that involve combining verbs and clauses. To begin with, two monoclausal constructions are discussed: compound verbs and serial verbs. This part is to highlight the clause combining structure on verbs in English language. Plus, there are other clause combining constructions, covering clausal subjects, clausal objects, adverbial and relative clauses. This helps students to understand another level of constituent in a sentence and this cannot be overlooked.
The ending chapter is Chapter 15 Pragmatic grounding and pragmatically marked construction. This is built on understanding more than the literal meaning of English grammatical constructions. This is instead about the pragmatically marked constructions, and some notions namely referentiality, contrastive focus, topicality and fronting and cleft constructions in English. Those specific types of constructions in English carry pragmatic functions, it is like a metaphorical meaning of an English construction. Within the scope of pragmatically marked construction types, negative constructions, imperatives, wh-questions, and yes/no questions are also covered. The pragmatic use of those English constructions is clearly to be posited in a form of conveying different communicative purposes.
Overall, the above 15 chapters with the introductory chapter are organized in a sequence from a morpheme, word, sentence to a higher level of clausal or clausal combining constructions. This book has a very strong linguistic-orientation, filling with sophistical and theoretical English linguistic notions. This book also includes basic and practical grammar terms. This book is an English grammar book for students who are at higher education level, and it is highly inspiring and useful to those students who major in English linguistics or language studies disciplines. ...more "

Jul 23, 2023 10:36PM · see review