A Preliminary Understanding of English Syntax Iwan Fauzi 1

A PRELIMINARY
UNDERSTANDING OF
ENGLISH SYNTAX

A LECTURING MODULE FOR

STUDENTS LEARNING ENGLISH SYNTAX

IWAN FAUZI, MA.

A Preliminary Understanding of English Syntax Iwan Fauzi 2

 Specially compiled to my students
in learning English Syntax at STAIN Palangka Raya

2012

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 Some pages of this lecturing module are intentionally hidden

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1. Basic Properties of English Syntax
1.1 Some Remarks on the Essence of Human
Language
One of the crucial functions of any human language, such as
English or Korean, is to convey various kinds of information from the
everyday to the highly academic. Language provides a means for us to
describe how to cook, how to remove cherry stains, how to understand
English grammar, or how to provide a convincing argument. We
commonly consider certain properties of language to be key essential
features from which the basic study of linguistics starts.
The first well-known property (as emphasized by Saussure 1916) is
that there is no motivated relationship between sounds and
meanings. This is simply observed in the fact that the same meaning is
usually expressed by a different sounding-word in a different language
(think of house, maison, casa). For words such as hotdog, desk, dog,
bike, hamburger, cranberry, sweetbread, their meanings have nothing
to do with their shapes. For example, the word hotdog has no
relationship with a dog which is or feels hot. There is just an arbitrary
relationship between the word’s sound and its meaning: this
relationship is decided by the convention of the community the
speakers belong to.
The second important feature of language, and one more central to
syntax, is that language makes infinite use of finite set of rules or
principles, the observation of which led the development of generative
linguistics in the 20th century (cf. Chomsky 1965). A language is a
system for combining its parts in infinitely many ways. One piece of
evidence of the system can be observed in word-order restrictions. If a

A Preliminary Understanding of English Syntax Iwan Fauzi 1

sentence is an arrangement of words and we have 5 words such as man,
ball, a, the, and kicked, how many possible combinations can we have
from these five words? More importantly, are all of these combinations
grammatical sentences? Mathematically, the number of possible
combinations of 5 words is 5! (factorial), equalling 120 instances. But
among these 120 possible combinations, only 6 form grammatical
English sentences:
(1) a. The man kicked a ball.
b. A man kicked the ball.
c. The ball kicked a man.
d. A ball kicked the man.
e. The ball, a man kicked.
f. The man, a ball kicked.
All the other 114 combinations, a few of which are given in (2), are
unacceptable to native speakers of English. We use the notation * to
indicate that a hypothesized example is ungrammatical.
(2) a. *Kicked the man the ball.
b. *Man the ball kicked the.
c. *The man a ball kicked.
It is clear that there are certain rules in English for combining words.
These rules constrain which words can be combined together or how
they may be ordered, sometimes in groups, with respect to each other.
Such combinatory rules also play important roles in our
understanding of the syntax of an example like (3a). Whatever these
rules are, they should give a different status to (3b), an example which
is judged ungrammatical by native speakers even though the intended
meaning of the speaker is relatively clear and understandable.
(3) a. Kim lives in the house Lee sold to her.

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 b. *Kim lives in the house Lee sold it to her.
The requirement of such combinatory knowledge also provides an
argument for the assumption that we use just a finite set of resources in
producing grammatical sentences, and that we do not just rely on the
meaning of words involved. Consider the examples in (4):
(4) a. *Kim fond of Lee.
b. Kim is fond of Lee.
Even though it is not difficult to understand the meaning of (4a),
English has a structural requirement for the verb is as in (4b).
More natural evidence of the ‘finite set of rules and principles’ idea
can be found in cognitive, creative abilities. Speakers are unconscious
of the rules which they use all the time, and have no difficulties in
producing or understanding sentences which they have never heard,
seen, or talked about before. For example, even though we may well
not have seen the following sentence before, we can understand its
meaning if we have a linguistic competence in English:

(5) In January 2002, a dull star in an obscure constellation suddenly

became 600,000 times more luminous than our Sun, temporarily
making it the brightest star in our galaxy.

A related part of this competence is that a language speaker can

produce an infinite number of grammatical sentences. For example,
given the simple sentence (6a), we can make a more complex one like
(6b) by adding the adjective tall. To this sentence, we can again add
another adjective handsome as in (6c). We could continue adding
adjectives, theoretically enabling us to generate an infinitive number of
sentences:

(6) a. The man kicked the ball.

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 b. The tall man kicked the ball.
c. The handsome, tall man kicked the ball.
d. The handsome, tall, nice man kicked the ball.
e. . . .

One might argue that since the number of English adjectives could be
limited, there would be a dead-end to this process. However, no one
would find themselves lost for another way to keep the process going
(cf. Sag et al. 2003):

(7) a. Some sentences can go on.

b. Some sentences can go on and on.
c. Some sentences can go on and on and on.
d. Some sentences can go on and on and on and on.
e. . . .

To (7a), we add the string and on, producing a longer one (7b). To this
resulting sentence (7c), we once again add and on. We could in
principle go on adding without stopping: this is enough to prove that we
could make an infinite number of well-formed English sentences.
Given these observations, how then can we explain the fact that we
can produce or understand an infinite number of grammatical sentences
that we have never heard or seen before? It seems implausible to
consider that we somehow memorize every example, and in fact we do
not (Pullum and Scholz 2002). We know that this could not be true, in
particular when we consider that native speakers can generate an
infinite number of infinitely long sentences, in principle. In addition,
there is limit to the amount of information our brain can keep track of,
and it would be implausible to think that we store an infinite number of
sentences and retrieve whenever we need to do so.

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 These considerations imply that a more appropriate hypothesis
would be something like (8):

(8) All native speakers have a grammatical competence which can

generate an infinite set of grammatical sentences from a finite
set of resources.

This hypothesis has been generally accepted by most linguists, and has
been taken as the subject matter of syntactic theory. In terms of
grammar, this grammatical competence is hypothesized to characterize
a generative grammar, which we then can define as follows (for
English, in this instance):

(9) Generative Grammar:

An English generative grammar is the one that can generate an
infinite set of well-formed English sentences from a finite set of
rules or principles.

The job of syntax is thus to discover and formulate these rules or

principles. These rules tell us how words are put together to form
grammatical phrases and sentences. Generative grammar, or generative
syntax, thus aims to define these rules which will characterize all of the
sentences which native speakers will accept as well-formed and
grammatical.

1.2 How We Discover Rules

How can we then find out what the generative rules of English syntax
are? These rules are present in the speakers’ minds, but are not
consciously accessible; speakers cannot articulate their content, if asked
to do so. Hence we discover the rules indirectly, and of the several
methods for inferring these hidden rules, hypotheses based on the

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observed data of the given language are perhaps the most reliable.
These data can come from speakers’ judgments – known as intuitions –
or from collected data sets – often called corpora. Linguistics is in one
sense an empirical science as it places a strong emphasis on
investigating the data underlying a phenomenon of study.
The canonical steps for doing empirical research can be
summarized as follows:
 Step I: Data collection and observation.
 Step II: Make a hypothesis to cover the first set of data.
 Step III: Check the hypothesis with more data.
 Step IV: Revise the hypothesis, if necessary.
Let us see how these steps work for discovering one of the grammar
rules in English, in particular, the rule for distinguishing count and non-
count nouns:

[Step I: Observing Data] To discover a grammar rule, the first thing

we need to do is to check out grammatical and ungrammatical variants
of the expression in question. For example, let us look at the usage of
the word evidence:

(10) Data Set 1: evidence

a. *The professor found some strong evidences of water on
Mars.
b. *The professor was hoping for a strong evidence.
c. *The evidence that John found was more helpful than the
one that Smith found.
What can you tell from these examples? We can make the following
observations:
(11) Observation 1:
a. evidence cannot be used in the plural.

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 b. evidence cannot be used with the indefinite article a(n).
c. evidence cannot be referred to by the pronoun one.
In any scientific research one example is not enough to draw any
conclusion. However, we can easily find more words that behave like
evidence:

(12) Data Set 2: equipment

a. *We had hoped to get three new equipments every month,
but we only had enough money to get an equipment every
two weeks.
b. *The equipment we bought last year was more expensive
than the one we bought this year.

We thus extend Observation 1 a little bit further:

(13) Observation 2:
a. evidence/equipment cannot be used in the plural.
b. evidence/equipment cannot be used with the indefinite
article a(n).
c. evidence/equipment cannot be referred to by the pronoun
one.
It is usually necessary to find contrastive examples to understand the
range of a given observation. For instance, words like clue and tool act
differently:
(14) Data Set 3: clue
a. The professor gave John some good clues for the question.
b. The student was hoping for a good clue.
c. The clue that John got was more helpful than the one that
Smith got.
(15) Data Set 4: tool
a. The teacher gave John some good tools for the purpose.

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 b. The student was hoping for a tool.
c. The tool that Jones got was more helpful than the one that
Smith got.
Unlike equipment and evidence, the nouns clue and tool can be used in
the test linguistic contexts we set up. We thus can add Observation 3,
different from Observation 2:
(16) Observation 3:
a. clue/tool can be used in the plural.
b. clue/tool can be used with the indefinite article a(n).
c. clue/tool can be referred to by the pronoun one.

[Step II: Forming a Hypothesis] From the data and observations we

have made so far, can we make any hypothesis about the English
grammar rule in question? One hypothesis that we can make is
something like the following:

(17) First Hypothesis:

English has at least two groups of nouns, Group I (count
nouns) and Group II (non-count nouns), diagnosed by tests of
plurality, the indefinite article, and the pronoun one.

[Step III: Checking the Hypothesis] Once we have formed such a

hypothesis, we need to check out if it is true of other data, and also see
if it can bring other analytical consequences.
A little further thought allows us to find support for the two-way
distinction for nouns. For example, consider the usage of much and
many:
(18) a. much evidence, much equipment, much information, much
furniture, much advice
b. *much clue, *much tool, *much armchair, *much bags

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 (19) a. *many evidence, *many equipment, *many information,
*many furniture, *many advice
b. many clues, many tools, many suggestions, many armchairs

As observed here, count nouns can occur only with many, whereas non-
count nouns can combine with much. Similar support can be found
from the usage of little and few:
(20) a. little evidence, little equipment, little advice, little
information
b. *little clue, *little tool, *little suggestion, *little armchair

(21) a. *few evidence, *few equipment, *few furniture, *few

advice, *few information
b. few clues, few tools, suggestions, few armchairs
The word little can occur with non-count nouns like evidence, yet few
cannot. Meanwhile, few occurs only with count nouns.
Given these data, it appears that the two-way distinction is quite
plausible and persuasive. We can now ask if this distinction into just
two groups is really enough for the classification of nouns. Consider the
following examples with cake:
(22) a. The mayor gave John some good cakes.
b. The president was hoping for a good cake.
c. The cake that Jones got was more delicious than the one that
Smith got.
Similar behavior can be observed with a noun like beer, too:
(23) a. The bartender gave John some good beers.
b. No one knows how to tell from a good beer to a bad one.
These data show us that cake and beer may be classified as count
nouns. However, observe the following:
(24) a. My pastor says I ate too much cake.

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 b. The students drank too much beer last night.
(25) a. We recommend to eat less cake and pastry.
b. People now drink less beer.
The data mean that cake and beer can also be used as non-count nouns
since that can be used with less or much.

[Step IV: Revising the Hypothesis] The examples in (24) and (25)
imply that there is another group of nouns that can be used as both
count and non-count nouns. This leads us to revise the hypothesis in
(17) as following:
(26) Revised Hypothesis:
There are at least three groups of nouns: Group 1 (count
nouns), Group 2 (non-count nouns), and Group 3 (count and
non-count).
We can expect that context will determine whether a Group 3 noun is
used as count or as noncount.
As we have observed so far, the process of finding finite grammar
rules crucially hinges on finding data, drawing generalizations, making
a hypothesis, and revising this hypothesis with more data.

1.3 Why Do We Study Syntax and

What Is It Good for?
There are many reasons for studying syntax, from general humanistic or
behavioral motivations to much more specific goals such as those in the
following:
 To help us to illustrate the patterns of English more effectively and
clearly.
 To enable us to analyze the structure of English sentences in a
systematic and explicit way.

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 For example, let us consider how we could use the syntactic notion
of head, which refers to the essential element within a phrase. The
following is a short and informal rule for English subject-verb
agreement.
(27) In English, the main verb agrees with the head element of the
subject.

This informal rule can pinpoint what is wrong with the following two

examples:

(28) a. *The recent strike by pilots have cost the country a great
deal of money from tourism and so on.
b. *The average age at which people begin to need eyeglasses
vary considerably.
Once we have structural knowledge of such sentences, it is easy to see
that the essential element of the subject in (28a) is not pilots but strike.
This is why the main verb should be has but not have to observe the
basic agreement rule in (27). Meanwhile, in (28b), the head is the noun
age, and thus the main verb vary needs to agree with this singular noun.
It would not do to simply talk about ‘the noun’ in the subject in the
examples in (28), as there is more than one. We need to be able to talk
about the one which gives its character to the phrase, and this is the
head. If the head is singular, so is the whole phrase, and similarly for
plural. The head of the subject and the verb (in the incorrect form) are
indicated in (29):
(29) a. *[The recent strike by pilots] have cost the country a great
deal of money from tourism and so on.
b. *[The average age at which people begin to need
eyeglasses] vary considerably.

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Either example can be made into a grammatical version by pluralizing
the head noun of the subject.
Now let us look at some slightly different cases. Can you explain
why the following examples are unacceptable?
(30) a. *Despite of his limited educational opportunities, Abraham
Lincoln became one of the greatest intellectuals in the
world.
b. *A pastor was executed, notwithstanding on many
applications in favor of him.
To understand these examples, we first need to recognize that the words
despite and notwithstanding are prepositions, and further that canonical
English prepositions combine only with noun phrases. In (30), these
prepositions combine with prepositional phrases again (headed by of
and on respectively), violating this rule.
A more subtle instance can be found in the following:
(31) a. Visiting relatives can be boring.
b. I saw that gas can explode.
These examples each have more than one interpretation. The first one
can mean either that the event of seeing our relatives is a boring
activity, or that the relatives visiting us are themselves boring. The
second example can either mean that a specific can containing gas
exploded, which I saw, or it can mean that I observed that gas has a
possibility of exploding. If one knows English syntax, that is, if one
understands the syntactic structure of these English sentences, it is easy
to identify these different meanings.
Here is another example which requires certain syntactic
knowledge:

(32) He said that that ‘that’ that that man used was wrong.

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This is the kind of sentence one can play with when starting to learn
English grammar. Can you analyze it? What are the differences among
these five thats? Structural (or syntactic) knowledge can be used to
diagnose the differences. Part of our study of syntax involves making
clear exactly how each word is categorized, and how it contributes to a
whole sentence.
When it comes to understanding a rather complex sentence,
knowledge of English syntax can be a great help. Syntactic or structural
knowledge helps us to understand simple as well as complex English
sentences in a systematic way. There is no difference in principle
between the kinds of examples we have presented above and (33):
(33) The government’s plan, which was elaborated in a document
released by the Treasury yesterday, is the formal outcome of
the Government commitment at the Madrid summit last year
to put forward its ideas about integration.
Apart from having more words than the examples we have introduced
above, nothing in this example is particularly complex.

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situation is not important or specific, there is often a preference to use
the passive voice:

(3) a. Targets can be observed at any angle.

b. During the early evening, Saturn can be found in the north,
while Jupiter rises in the east.

Similarly, we use the passive voice in formal, scientific, or technical

writing or reports to place an emphasis or an objective presentation on
the process or principle being described. For example, compare the
following pair:

(4) a. I poured 20cc of acid into the beaker.

b. About 20cc of acid was poured into the beaker.

It is clear that unlike the active sentence (4a), the passive sentence (4b)
assigns a more objective perspective to the process described.
In this chapter, leaving aside these discourse- or genre-motivated
features of the use of passive constructions, we will look into the
syntactic and semantic relationships between active and passive as well
as the properties of different passive constructions.

7.2 Relationships between Active and Passive

Consider the two canonical active and passive counterpart
sentences:

(5) a. The executive committee approved the new policy.

b. The new policy was approved by the executive committee.

How do these construction types differ?

Grammatical Functions and Subcategorization: As briefly noted

earlier, one of the main differences we can observe between (5a) and
(5b) is that the passive sentence has a ‘promoted’ object: the new policy

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is the passive sentence subject, while the notional subject the executive
committee is realized, optionally, in a PP (headed by by). By definition,
a transitive verb form such as taken or chosen must have an object:

(6) a. John has taken Bill to the library.

b. John has chosen Bill for the position.

(7) a. *John has taken ___ to the library.

b. *John has chosen ___ for the position.

Yet, with the passive construction of such verbs, the object NP is

not present in post-verbal position, and must not be:

(8) a. *The guide has been taken John to the library.

b. *The department has been chosen John for the position.

(9) a. John has been taken ___ to the library.

b. John has been chosen ___ for the position.

The absence of the object in the passive is due to the fact that the
argument that would have been the object of the active verb has been
promoted to be the subject in the passive.

Apart from the direct object, other subcategorization requirement

stays unchanged in a passive form. For example, the active form
handed in (10) requires an NP and a PP[to] as its complements, and the
passive handed in (11) still requires the PP complement:

(10) a. Pat handed a book to Chris.

b. *Pat handed to Chris.
c. *Pat handed a book.

(11) a. A book was handed to Chris (by Pat).

b. *A book was handed (by Pat).

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 Other Selectional Properties: The third important property,
following from the fact that the active verb’s object is promoted to the
passive construction’s subject, is that other selectional properties of the
verb are preserved. For example, if the usual postverbal constituent
should be an expletive form like it, this requirement is on the subject in
the passive. Compare the following:

(12) a. They believe it/*Stephen to be easy to annoy Ben.

b. They believe there to be a dragon in the wood.

(13) a. It/*Stephen is believed to be easy to annoy Ben.

b. There is believed to be a dragon in the wood.

If the active complement is itself a clause, so must the subject of the

passive verb be a clause:

(14) a. No one believes/suspects [that he is a fool].

b. [That he is a fool] is believed/suspected by no one.

Finally, if the postverbal constituent can be understood as part of an

idiom, so can the subject in the passive:

(15) a. They believe the cat to be out of the bag.

b. The cat is believed to be out of the bag.

We thus can conclude that the subject of the passive form is the
argument which corresponds to the object of the active.

Morpho-syntactic changes: In addition to changes in argument

realization, the passive construction requires the auxiliary verb be in
conjunction with the passive form of the verb -ed. In addition to
‘passive be’ italicized in the examples below, there can be other
auxiliary verbs, with the passive auxiliary last in the sequence:

(16) a. John drove the car.  The car was driven.

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 b. John was driving the car. The car was being driven.
c. John will drive the car. The car will be driven.
d. John has driven the car. The car has been driven.
e. John has been driving the car. The car has been being
driven.
f. John will have been driving the car.  The car will have
been being driven.

Semantics: In terms of meaning, as noted above, there is no change

in the semantic role assigned to the argument which is the subject in the
passive. The agent argument of active verb is expressed as an optional
oblique argument of the PP headed by the preposition by in the passive,
or not at all:

(17) a. Pat handed Chris a note.

b. Chris was handed a note (by Pat).

(18) a. TV puts ideas into children’s heads.

b. Ideas are put into children’s heads (by TV).

The observations above mean that any grammar needs to capture

the following basic properties of passive:

 Passive turns the active object into the passive subject;

 Passive leaves other aspects of the COMPS value of the active verb
unchanged;
 Passive optionally allows the active subject to be the object in a PP
headed by the preposition by;
 Passive makes the appropriate morphological change in the form of
the main verb, and requires the auxiliary be;
 Passive leaves the semantics unchanged.

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Reference

Jong-Bok Kim and Peter Sells. 2007. English Syntax: An

Introduction. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and
Information.

Andrew McIntyre. 2001. Fundamentals of English Syntax.

London: Blackwell.

Mark Newson. 2006. Basic English Syntax with Exercise.

Budapest: Bölcsész Konzorcium HEFOP Iroda.

Marcella Frank. 1991. Modern English Structure. New York.

Betty Schrampfer. 2008. Understanding and Using English

Grammar. New York: Pearson Education.

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