Max Morenberg EH mount union COLLEGE $2595 DOING GRAMMAR Second Edition Max Morenberg New York Oxford OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1997 Oxford University Press Oxford New York Athens Auckland Buenos Aires Florence Hong Kong Kuala Lumpur Mexico City Taipei Bangkok Calcutta Istanbul Madras Nairobi Tokyo Bogota Cape Town Madrid Paris Bombay Dar es Salaam Delhi Karachi Melbourne Singapore Toronto and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 1997 by Oxford University Press, Inc Published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Morenberg, Max, 1940Doing grammar / Max Morenberg — 2nd ed p cm Includes index, ISBN 0-19-509783-1 English language—Grammar Grammar—Problems, exercises, etc PEI 112.M64 English language— I Title 1997 428.2—dc20 96-26020 CIP Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Contents * Preface, vii CHAPTER IDENTIFYING VERB TYPES, Preview, What Is Grammar? How We Define Grammar, Structure, The Implications of Verbs Are Central to Sentence Intransitive Verbs, Transitive Verbs, Two-Place Transitive Verbs, Two-Place Transitives: Vg Verbs, Vc Verbs, 12 Linking Verbs, Two-Place Transitives: The Verb Be, 13 Types, 14 Summary of Verb Verbs and Slots and Nuclei, 15 Change Categories, 15 Verbs Can More Patterns and Some References, 16 Summary, 18 Exercises I writing definitions, 20 II identifying verb types, CHAPTER ANALYZING SENTENCES, 23 Preview, 23 Two Main Sentence Parts, 24 Subjects and Predicates, 24 Hierarchies, 30 Finding Constituents and the Colonel, 27 Diagraming and a Ride on the Author’s Hobbyhorse, 31 Explained, Sort Of, 35 Prepositional Phrases, 34 Adverbs Multiple-Word Verbs, 38 Summary, 41 Exercises constituents, I writing 43 definitions, 42 II identifying sentence 20 iv CONTENTS CHAPTER EXPANDING VERB PHRASES, 46 Preview, 46 Verb Status, 47 the Predicate, 50 Tense, 48 Mood, a Brief Definition, 51 Auxiliaries and Conditional Mood, 51 Future Tense? 54 Aspect, 55 Past Participles, 57 Exercises What Happened to Perfect Aspect, 55 Progressive Aspect, 58 Participles from Adjectives, 60 65 I writing definitions, III Differentiating Putting Tense, Modality, and Aspect Principal Parts of Verbs, 62 forms, 66 Modal Modal Auxiliaries, 51 Conditional Mood and Future Time, 53 Together, 60 Tense and II Summary, 64 changing main-verb identifying verb status and analyzing sentences, 66 CHAPTER EXPLORING NOUN PHRASES, 69 Preview, 69 Types of Nouns, 69 Determiners, 70 Adjectives, 71 Proper or Common, 70 The Difference between Determiners and Articles, 72 Demonstratives, 73 Possessive Pronouns, 74 Numbers, 74 Post-noun Modifiers, 79 Genitive Nouns (a.k.a Possessive Nouns), 79 Other Types of Pronouns, 82 Pronouns, 83 Reflexive Pronouns, 83 Pronouns, 84 Summary, 84 Exercises Pre-articles, 75 I 85 writing definitions, stituents AND ANALYZING SENTENCES, Personal Indefinite II identifying noun con¬ 85 CHAPTER REARRANGING AND COMPOUNDING, 89 Preview, 90 Questions, 97 Rearranging, 90 Yes/No Questions, 97 Passive Sentences, 103 Deleting By Phrases, 108 Gone? 108 Wh-Questions, 98 The Structure of Passives, 106 Where Have All the Constituents Adjectives or Past Participles? 110 Passives with Get, 110 Negatives and Questions in Passives, 111 MV Status in Passives, 111 Expletives, 113 Negative Sentences, 91 Sentences with There, 112 Imperative Sentences, 115 Understood You in Imperative Sentences, 115 Diagraming Imperatives, 116 The Status of Imperatives, 116 CONTENTS V Imperatives and Negatives, 117 Conjunctions, 120 Compounding, 117 Punctuating Compounds, 120 Conjunctive Adverbs, 123 Summary, 124 Exercises I writing definitions, 125 II rearranging and com¬ pounding sentences, 125 III ANALYZING SENTENCES, 126 CHAPTER CONSTRUCTING RELATIVE CLAUSES, 130 Preview, 130 Clauses, 131 Why Do You Combine Clauses? 131 Relative Clauses, 132 Function of Relative Clauses, 132 Embedded, 132 The Structure and Where Relative Clauses Are The Structure of Relative Clauses: The Way It Was, 133 The Relation of a Relative Clause to Its Matrix Clause, 136 Relatives, 141 Constructing Relative Clauses, 138 Choosing a Relative Pronoun, 141 Fronted Relatives and Functions, 144 Noun Phrases, 146 Embedding Relative Clauses into Dependent Clauses, 147 Summary, 148 Deleting Object Restrictive Clauses, 148 Clauses, 148 Relative Clauses, 148 Grammar as a Discrete Combinatorial System, 149 Hierarchy as Underlying Design, 149 Exercises 149 III I writing definitions, 149 II BREAKING OUT UNDERLYING SENTENCE, ING SENTENCES, combining sentences, 150 IV ANALYZ¬ 151 CHAPTER REDUCING RELATIVE CLAUSES TO PHRASES, 155 Preview, 155 Reducing Relative Clauses, 155 Present Participial Phrases, 156 Prepositional Phrases, 161 Phrases, 164 and Adjectives, 165 Past Participial Phrases, 159 Constituency within Embedded Single-Word Participles, Adverbs, Restrictive Phrases, 167 Parsing, Onion Peeling, and “Thermogrammatics”: Some Irreverent Thoughts, 167 Problems Identifying Constituents, 173 Summary, 174 Exercises I writing definitions, 175 II breaking out underly¬ ing sentences, 175 III COMBINING SENTENCES, 175 IV ANALYZING SENTENCES, 176 vi CONTENTS CHAPTER MAKING NOUN CLAUSES, GERUNDS, AND INFINITIVES, 181 Preview, 181 That-Clauses, 182 Clauses from Relative Clauses, 185 Wh-Clauses, 187 Distinguishing Noun Moving That-Clauses, 186 Infinitives That Function as Nouns, 195 Words That Introduce Infinitives, 197 as Adverbs, 200 Gerunds, 200 Processes Together, 204 Infinitives That Function Putting Structures and Summary, 205 Exercises underly¬ ing SENTENCES, ANALYZ¬ ING I writing definitions, 205 II breaking out 206 III COMBINING SENTENCES, 206 IV sentences, 207 CHAPTER ADDING MODIFIERS TO SENTENCES, 212 Preview, 212 Nonrestrictive Modifiers, 213 Nonrestrictive Relative Clauses, 214 Participial Phrases, 218 Appositive Nouns and Adjectives, 219 Phrases, 219 Appositive Noun Appositive Adjective Phrases, 222 Absolute Phrases, 223 Adverb Clauses, 227 Putting Sentence Modifiers Together, 231 Taking Sentences Apart, 232 Exercises I ing SENTENCES, writing definitions, 234 236 III A Final Word on Summary and Implications, 233 234 II breaking out underly¬ COMBINING SENTENCES, 235 IV ANA¬ LYZING SENTENCES, CHAPTER 10 WHAT CAN YOU DO NOW THAT YOU CAN DO GRAMMAR? THE RHETORIC OF SENTENCES, 241 Preview, 241 Reflecting on Literature: Style and Meaning, 243 Getting Rid of Gibberish, 248 Sentences, 251 Effectiveness, 254 Constructing Effective Using Punctuation to Improve Sentence Summary and Implications, 260 Exercises, 260 APPENDIX: SELECTED ANSWERS, 262 Index, 288 Preface I doubt whether any school subject is so universally dreaded and loathed by students and remembered with so much discomfort by adults The term grammar will generally make people grimace and snarl When I want to free myself from a particularly obnoxious person at a cocktail party, all I have to is tell him that I’m a grammarian Without fail, he’ll lower his head and sidle away, mumbling into his shirt collar, “I never did well at that in school.” When I like the person and want to continue the conversation with her, I say I’m a linguist If you’re one of those who would rather eat lint than grammar, I know how you feel, because I hated grammar as a kid I even failed eleventh-grade English because of my animosity for the subject Grammar classes seemed an endless repetition of silly rules and mind¬ less diagrams that took up a portion of every year from third grade to twelfth grade The lessons never stuck in my mind because nothing about grammar ever seemed to make sense Grammar was something you had to endure, like the awful tasting cough syrup that was supposed to be good for you It’s odd that so many of us hate studying grammar It’s like cats hat¬ ing to stalk prey Or dolphins learning to dislike swimming Humans are as much language animals as cats are stalking animals and dolphins are swimming animals We are bom to love language and everything associated with it—rhythm, rhyme, word meanings, grammar If you want to make a three-year-old child roll on the floor laughing, just tell her a riddle, or alliterate words, or read her Dr Seuss’s lilting rhythms and rhymes about cats in hats or elephants who are “faithful, one hun¬ dred percent” or Sam I Am eating green eggs and ham on a boat with viii PREFACE a goat Listen to a child in a crib entertaining himself by repeating sounds and syllables, playing with language Think about the games you played in kindergarten by creating strange words like Mary Poppins’ supercalifragilisticexpialidotious Keep a ten-year old entertained on a car trip by producing odd sentences in a “Mad Libs” game Then ask an eighth grader what subject she hates most The answer will invariably be gram¬ mar We’re bom to love grammar We are taught to hate it I was taught to hate it by well-meaning teachers who presented gram¬ mar as morality lessons of do’s and don’ts I learned only the most triv¬ ial lessons—that you shouldn’t end sentences in prepositions or start sentences with conjunctions of write fragments When I found profes¬ sional writers who used fragments, who ended sentences with preposi¬ tions, or who began them with conjunctions, I was told that it’s all right for professional writers to break the rules because they know them Not a satisfactory answer It made me disdain the subject even more Then in a junior-level grammar class at Florida State University, Kellogg Hunt introduced me to Paul Roberts’s English Sentences, and I began to see grammar in a new way Roberts said that grammar is “something that produces the sentences of a language.” He went on to explain that grammar is a system which puts words into an under¬ standable order Roberts illustrated the point with a simple game You put words on twenty-five cards, one word to a card, and place the cards in a hat The words are face, my, never, his, dog, usually, car, struck, the, liked, a, washed, window, sometimes, seldom, George, stroked, he, she, Annabelle, her, goldfish, often, Sam, touched If you pick the cards from the hat, one at a time, and place them in rows of five, you’ll probably never come out with an English sentence You’ll get nonsense like struck the she Sam touched But if you first arrange the cards into stacks following the pattern Edith frequently ignored her son, and pick them in order starting with the Edith stack, you’ll always produce a fiveword sentence like George usually struck my goldfish or Annabelle sometimes touched her dog In fact, there are hundreds of such sen¬ tence in the hat What you’ve done by arranging the cards is to sort words into classes and then put the classes in order If you play long enough with the sen¬ tences, you discover important facts about the ordering of words—that words make constituents, units like his window, washed his window, seldom washed his window, and Sam seldom washed his window You find that a noun phrase can fit within a verb phrase, that the new appendix: selected answers 280 o x 0£ e X P u P a3 o -3 c e (/I > p p a A> P Si o CD T3 W) c | u o „ ? 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