Linguistic Practices in Traditional Grammar: Parts of Speech, Parsing, and Concatenation

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1.0 INTRODUCTION

For many centuries, grammarians have tried to discern a basic grammatical system that would hold good for all languages at all times. This search for a universal grammar has proved fruitless. Types of expression that are necessary and fundamental in English may not occur at all in other languages. We cannot, therefore, assume that the categories we set up and describe have any validity apart from the language whose analysis required them.

In this unit, we shall discuss some of the linguistic practices of the traditional grammarians – classification of words into ‘parts of speech’, parsing, and concatenation.

2.0 OBJECTIVES

At the end of this unit, you should:

• identify the traditional ‘parts of speech’ and the criteria used in arriving at them

• explain what parsing means and how to parse

• state what concatenation means in traditional grammar.

3.1 The Definition of Grammatical Terms

There is a feeling that persists in most of us and impedes our study of grammar – the feeling that there is something final and absolute in grammatical categories. This habit of mind persuades us, for example, that a given word is either a noun or not a noun. It is hard for us to suppose that it can be part noun and part adjective, and it is reversible for us to conceive that it can be a noun to some people and an adjective to others. So when we ask our teacher about the part of speech of "good" in "the good die young," and when our teacher answers that it may be considered either a noun or an adjective depending on our definition, we are dissatisfied. We persist: “But what is it really? What is the right definition?” And if the teacher answers, “There isn’t any right definition; it isn’t anything really,” then we are completely confused.

Let us try an analogy. We may conceive that a four-wheeled vehicle is necessarily either a car, a truck, or a bus. But if we were to stand at an intersection and tally the cars, trucks, and buses that pass, we would encounter problems. Most of the passing vehicles would be easily recognized as one of the three. But a small proportion would puzzle us. Is the ‘pick-up’ van a car or a truck? Is the vehicle with the back seat torn out and a truck bed installed a car or a truck? What is the jeep? Answers will depend on definitions. We can define car so that all of these will count as cars; or we can define car so that some or all of them will count as trucks or buses. And the question “Is it really a car?” is meaningless in any case because any definition will be varied by our purpose in making the classification and valuable only if it enables us to classify according to our purpose with a minimum of uncertainty.

So with grammatical definitions, they are not so much right or wrong as good or bad, careful or sloppy, useful or impractical. We define nouns not to establish the nature or essence of nounness but to be able to talk more conveniently about a large group of words in which we perceive some similarity. Our definition is good if it is readily understandable and applicable, and if it eliminates or reduces as far as possible the borderline of doubtful cases. Some grammatical terms, however, cannot be so defined as to eliminate all borderline.

Some confusion and argument can be avoided if we understand the bases of our definition. There are at least three possible bases, which will be called here the formal, the syntactic, and the notional. By formal definition, we mean definition based on form – sounds in the spoken language, spelling in the written. By syntactic definition, we mean definition based on syntax – the relation of words to other words in the sentence. By notional definition, we mean definition based on our understanding of the relationship of words to the actual, real-world phenomena represented by the words.

For illustration, let us make three brief and incomplete definitions of a noun:

Formal: A noun is a word that forms a plural in –s

Syntactic: A noun is a word that may serve as the subject of a verb

Notional: A noun is the name of a person, place, or thing

Obviously, none of these adequately defines noun, but each of them might be expanded and qualified so as to approach adequacy. Grammarians sometimes use one kind of definition and sometimes another, and sometimes a combination, as circumstances require or as their temperament leads them.

The first task of the grammarian is to group the words that occur in sentences so that he can talk about them. When he discovers which words naturally go together in groups, he gives the groups names, for the convenience of discussion. For example, if he examines the sentences:

The apple was ripe

The moon was bright

The car was old

he notes that apple, moon, and car are words that can occur in similar positions and preceded by the determiner the. In other English sentences, he finds other words which in form and behavior are similar to apple, moon, and car, and presently it is clear that apple, moon, and car are part of a large group of words. The grammarian then tries to define the group – that is, to state in general terms what it is that the members of the group have in common. The next step is to give the group a name – in this case, the name noun. Then, instead of saying “words like apple, moon, and car behave such and so,” he can say more simply, “nouns behave such and so.”

When we begin to examine a language for the purpose of describing it, we perceive at once that there are many correspondences between the language and the real-world phenomena expressed by the language. For example, in the real world there are substances, and in the language, certain words (nouns) name the substances; in the real world, there are qualities and in the language, certain words (adjectives) which suggest the qualities; in the real world, there are different attitudes of mind and in the language, there are certain verb forms (moods) which distinguish these attitudes.

However, as we look closely, we find that the correspondence between language and reality is not perfect; indeed, we find paradox and contradiction everywhere. Nouns do not always name substances; adjectives do not always suggest qualities; the same mood form may express different attitudes, and different mood forms may express the same attitude.

Such vagaries are inevitable, for language is a growth. Languages do not strive for logic and symmetry; they strive for communication. Therefore a grammatical system should not be more logical and symmetrical than the language it describes.

SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 1

Explain what you understand by the following:

1. formal definition

2. syntactic definition

3. notional definition

3.2 The Parts of Speech

Any approach to language which hopes to go beyond the fact of speech involves sequences of linguistic units (whether these be words, morphemes, phonemes, or whatever) must articulate classes of units at a certain level so that their occurrence with respect to each other may be specified. One such classification is the traditional one into ‘parts of speech’, first articulated by the grammarians of Classical Antiquity – most authoritatively by Dionysius Thrax, in the third century BCE. Substantially similar systems of parts of speech have gradually been developed for a large proportion of the languages of the world.

The vocabulary of the English language is customarily divided into eight major divisions called ‘parts of speech’: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. Some books set up a special category for the words "a," "an," and "the," which are called articles. These words, however, do not differ in any essential way from certain adjectives, and it is more usual to consider them with the adjective group.

Grammarians have frequently proposed a reduction of these categories. Some writers would put prepositions, adverbs, and conjunctions together and call them all particles – i.e., indeclinable relation words. Others wish to treat adverbs and prepositions together as one group, or nouns and adjectives, or nouns and pronouns. Good arguments can be advanced for some of these arrangements, and some simplification may eventually be made; meanwhile, we can make do with the familiar eight-term classification.

We should understand, however, that four of the parts of speech – nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs – differ essentially from the others. These categories are (i) partly identifiable by form, and (ii) practically unlimited in number. Consider the series beauty, beautify, beautiful, beautifully. No one of these can ordinarily be substituted for any of the others. Thus we say ‘That’s a beauty,’ but not ‘That’s a beautify’; ‘I’ll beautify it,’ but not ‘I’ll beautiful it’; ‘a beautiful woman,’ but not ‘a beautifully woman.’ Similarly, arrive and arrival, amusing and amusingly, soft and soften are not interchangeable. This correlation between four sets of forms and four sets of functions is the ultimate justification for setting up these four word categories.

All the other word groups in the language are closed classes (whether they are treated as four groups or more). That is, they are limited in number, and the class membership changes only very slowly. We may coin new nouns and verbs at will, but we cannot easily coin conjunctions or prepositions. Furthermore, these other classes are not identifiable by form. Verbs, for example, are identifiable often by signs like be (befriend, behead), or –fy (beautiful, identify), but no similar forms mark conjunctions.

Some difficulties are involved in treating the words left over from the major classes as a small number of parts of speech. This inevitably involves lumping together words that behave quite differently: "because" and "and," for example, are both called conjunctions, though they actually have little in common. The conventional treatment also tends to festoon the major classes with little groups of words essentially dissimilar. Thus, "where" is put in the same class with "beautifully," some in the same class with "beautiful." This procedure is awkward, but we can find our way along if we pay close attention to subdivisions.

A few words do not fit into any of the conventional groups. Such a word is the "to" that precedes the infinitive: “It’s time to stop,” or the "it" in “Is it true that he died?” There are not many such highly specialized words; however, and they create no serious problem.

Most grammars follow the same pattern in defining the parts of speech. Nouns and verbs are defined notionally (i.e., according to meaning): a noun is a word that names a person, place, or thing (e.g., man, box, beauty, John); a verb is a word that makes an assertion or indicates action or being (e.g., want, hit, come, be, sleep). All the other parts of speech are defined syntactically, on the basis of the definition of noun and verb: an adjective is a word that modifies a noun (e.g., big, incredible, foolish); an adverb is a word that modifies a verb (e.g., incredibly, yesterday, beautifully); a pronoun is a word that replaces or stands in the place of a noun (e.g., he, she, it, you, who); a preposition is a word relating other parts of speech (e.g., in, under, without, on); a conjunction is a word joining other parts of speech (e.g., and, that, because, if), and an interjection is an exclamatory word (such as hey, ouch, whoa).

This system seems neat and simple, and indeed it serves fairly well in practice, but close scrutiny (as we shall see later) tempers 'ration somewhat. Most of us begin our study of grammar with the notion that the parts of speech are watertight compartments. We believe not only that all words in context can be distributed among the eight categories but also that a given word in a given context must belong to one category and not to any of the others.

The actuality is not so simple; all of the compartments leak. Commonly defined, each part of speech bears certain resemblances to others, and the categories run together at border lines. Can we say that his in “That is his cat” is a pronoun and not an adjective, or that it is an adjective and not a pronoun? We can, of course, frame the definition of a pronoun or of an adjective so as to include or exclude the word, but it is probably more enlightening to call it a pronominal adjective (or adjectival pronoun), thus indicating that it has characteristics of both groups.

Similarly, at some points nouns can scarcely be distinguished from adjectives or from pronouns. Adverbs approach prepositions in function and conjunctions in another. Some words are both verb-like and noun-like. We can reduce the confusion somewhat by paying close attention to definition, but no definition of the traditional parts of speech can eliminate overlapping entirely.

SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 2

1. Name any four categories of parts of speech and provide three examples of each.

2. What part of speech are the following words? Ada, die, Nigeria, or, hei, unfortunately.

3.3 Parsing

In traditional grammar, parsing refers to the grammatical exercise involving the description of sentences and words by giving names to the grammatical categories of various elements, for example, subject, predicate, verb, object, number, case, gender, person, etc. To parse a word is to examine it in two different points: (i) what part of speech it is, and (ii) what part it plays in the building of a sentence.

Of the eight parts of speech, the only kind of word that cannot be parsed in relation to the part it plays in the building of a sentence is interjection. An interjection is unlike all the other parts of speech because it does nothing in the sentence, i.e., it does not help to make the sentence as the other parts of speech do. If it happens to occur in the middle of a sentence, it is not connected with any word either before or after. Sometimes it does not occur in any sentence but stands quite alone. So, in parsing such a word as oh!, pooh!, ah!, alas!, etc., the only thing we can say is that it is an interjection.

All the other parts of speech stand in some connection with other words, and must therefore be parsed. Thus, if we have to parse in, in such a phrase as “a bird in the hand,” we say not merely that it is a preposition, but a preposition having hand for its object. It shows what the bird has to do with the hand, or the hand with the bird. Also, if you were parsing the sentence: “My brother tortured our cat,” you would say that brother was a common noun, singular number, masculine gender, third person, nominative case. You would say that tortured was a finite verb, past tense, third person, singular number, indicative mood. In the older forms of the English language, when inflectional endings were more numerous, parsing was less difficult than it is now when we have but few of these inflectional endings left to guide us. Now we have to look chiefly to the work that a word does in a sentence and not expect so much help from the form or ending.

For an illustration, let us parse some parts of speech.

How to Parse Nouns

To parse a noun, you have to show four different things concerning it:

(a) of what kind it is - whether Proper, Common, Collective, Material, or Abstract;

(b) of what gender it is - whether Masculine, Feminine, Common, or Neuter;

(c) of what number it is - whether Singular or Plural; and

(d) in what case it is - whether Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, etc.

As an illustration, let us parse this sentence:

The Master of this class teaches French without a book.

Master: Common noun, Masculine gender, Singular number, Nominative case, Subject to the verb ‘teaches’.

Class: Collective noun, Neuter gender, Singular number, Accusative case after the preposition ‘of’.

French: Proper noun, Neuter gender, Singular number, Accusative case after the verb ‘teaches’.

Book: Common noun, Neuter gender, Singular number, Accusative case after the preposition ‘without’.

How to Parse Pronouns

To parse a pronoun, you have to show five different things concerning it:

(a) of what kind it is – whether Personal, Possessive, Demonstrative, Relative (i.e., Conjunctive), or Interrogative.

(b) of what gender it is – whether Masculine, Feminine, Common, or Neuter.

(c) of what number it is – whether Singular or Plural.

(d) of what person it is – whether first, second, or third

(e) in what case it is – whether Nominative, Accusative, etc.

For example, to parse the pronouns in the sentence:

I have written down your names in my book.

We proceed thus:

I: Personal pronoun, common gender, singular number, first person, nominative case, subject to the verb ‘have written’.

Your: Possessive adjective qualifying the noun ‘names’.

My: Possessive adjective qualifying the noun ‘book’.

How to Parse Finite Verbs

The points to be explained in the parsing of a Finite Verb are shown in their proper order in the two following tables:

Kind of Verb Conjugation Voice Mood Tense Form of Tense

Transitive Intransitive Strong Weak mixed Active Passive Indicative Imperative Subjunctive Present Indefinite Past Continuous Future Perfect Future in the past teous ct Perfect-continuous

Number Person Agreement

Singular Plural First Second Third Agreeing in and person with subject or subjects, expressed or understood

For an illustration, let us parse the verbs in the following sentences:

1. James has been fishing all the morning.

2. James and I will be promoted next year.

3. He worked hard that he might win a prize.

1. He’s been fishing: Intransitive verb, weak conjugation, Active voice, Indicative mood, Present Perfect-Continuous tense, having ‘James’ for its subject, and therefore in the singular number and third person.

2. Worked: Intransitive verb, weak conjugation, Active voice, Indicative mood, Past tense, having ‘he’ for its subject, and therefore in the singular number and third person.

3. Might win: Transitive verb, strong conjugation, Active voice, Subjunctive mood, Past tense, having ‘he’ for its subject, and therefore in the singular number and third person.

The rule relating to the agreement between a Finite verb and its subject is called Concord: “a verb must be in the same number and person as its Subject or Nominative.” Several special rules exist for working out this general concord or agreement. One of the rules states: “when two or more singular subjects are connected by and, the verb is plural” as in:

(a) Time and tide wait for no man.

(b) Ada and Mary are here.

The above is a sample of how parsing was done. Of course, someone was bound eventually to ask what good all this did. Did grammatical terminology teach you anything except grammatical terminology? Did learning to parse sentences or diagram sentences cause you to produce better sentences? In the early decades of the twentieth century, many educators asked these questions and answered them with a resounding ‘No’. Linguistics, by contrast, is less concerned with labels and more with the criteria of analysis which lead to the identification of these elements, and with the way in which speakers use these elements to relate sentences in the language as a whole.

SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 3

1. What do you understand by parsing?

2. Parse the nouns in the following sentences:

(a) John won the gold medal

(b) Samuel gave John a car

(c) Girls play football

3.4 Concatenation

To grasp the real structure of the English sentence, one must understand not only the words that occur but also the principles of arrangement. An English sentence does not consist simply of a string of words in free relation to one another. It consists of groups of words arranged in a series of levels, each word group being made up of smaller groups, until we get down to the single word.

In this discussion, we will adopt the view that all sentences of English have a simple linear structure; that is, that every sentence of language could be satisfactorily described, from the grammatical point of view, as a string (or sequence) of constituents (which we assume to be words). As an abstract illustration of what is meant by the term ‘string’ (which is the technical term used in mathematical treatments of the grammatical structure of language) we may consider the following instances:

a + b + c + d

The plus-sign is employed here to indicate concatenation, a term used in the formal representation of linguistic structure to refer to the process of linking elements together by placing them in sequence to form strings. The string results from the combination of the constituents or elements, in a particular order. What the order denotes depends upon the interpretation given to the system in its application to particular phenomena. In English, for example, the left-to-right ordering of written sentences as allowed by the convention is a particular kind of string. In transformational-generative grammar, a language is considered as a set of strings which consist of elements linked together by the process of concatenation. We assume that the combination of words resulting from the application of a grammatical rule constituted a string, with the order of the concatenated words being determined by the order in which the words occur in sentences of the language.

In English grammatical terminology, the notion of syntagmatic relationship does not necessarily presuppose an ordering of the elements between which the relationship held, instances abound of both sequential and non-sequential combination of elements. A string is a particular kind of syntagm (an ordered arrangement of parts) as concatenation is a particular kind of combination.

4.0 CONCLUSION

In this unit, we have tried to show the linguistic practices of traditional grammarians. You have seen that traditional grammar represents an amalgam of methods and principles traceable to many scholars of the ancient period. Although their methods and interests differ from current practices, we still owe them a lot of gratitude for the work they did.

5.0 SUMMARY

You have learned in this unit:

• what the different ‘parts of speech’ are;

• what formal, syntactic and notional definitions mean;

• what is meant by ‘parsing’, and how to parse; and

• what ‘concatenation’ means.

6.0 TUTOR MARKED ASSIGNMENT

(a) State the parts of speech of the words in italics in the following sentences:

(i) The criminal lawyer won the case

(ii) He bought the car for her

(iii) This is an interesting book

(iv) He did it because he is compassionate

(v) The house is behind the church

(b) Parse the verbs in the following sentences:

(i) She drove to Lagos

(ii) He has been sleeping since noon

(iii) They worked hard to pass their examinations

(iv) Come tomorrow

7.0 REFERENCES/FURTHER READINGS

Crystal, D. (1971). Linguistics. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books.

Friend, Jewell A. (1976). Traditional Grammar. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press.

Roberts, Paul. (1954). Understanding Grammar. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers.