Gramma

r and
Style
 Emotions or
Short thoughts
Element
introspective text of
nature
“You are the sun in
reverse,,
all energySimple
flowsstylistic
into
Metaphorical
you.”technique
construction
 STY
LE
Grammar?
 Grammar-hugely complex
set of interlocking:
categor uni structur
ies ts es
Rules of that
 In the academic study of
language, the expression
‘rules of grammar’ does not
refer to prescriptive nice
style, to the sorts of
proscriptions that forbid the
use of, say, a double
negative or a split infinitive.
 DOUBLE NEGATIVE

We didn't see nothing.

We saw
She nothing
never danced
with nobody.
She didn't dance with
anybody.
SPLIT INFINITIVE
“to boldly go
where no one has
gone before”
-Star Trek
 SPLIT INFINITIVE
to diligently read
to happily write
to scientifically illustrate
 The idea that you
shouldn’t put an adverb
in the middle of an
infinitive was introduced
by Henry Alford, the
Dean of Canterbury, in
his 1864 book The
Queen’s English.
“The safest
choice is to
avoid splitting
infinitives. ”
 One reason Alford gave for his belief was that
nobody was doing it (“. . . this practice is
entirely unknown to English speakers and
writers.”), but the Oxford English
Dictionary disagrees, reporting that split
infinitives were widespread at the time.
 Daniel Benjamin
Defoe Franklin

Thomas Lord
Cromwell Byron
Elizabeth
Gaskell

F. Scott E.B.Brow
 Some split infinitives have
become set phrases in English,
such as Star Trek’s
“to boldly go,” meaning that
“to go boldly” would sound odd.
In the case of a typical split
infinitive, however, a writer can
usually move the intervening
words without much offense
 In less common instances, moving
the adverb makes the sentence
awkward: “I want to quickly stop at
the bank” becomes “I want to stop
at the bank quickly.” (A more
natural-sounding choice would be “I
want to stop at the bank for a
minute.”)
 These so-called ‘rules’
are nothing more than
random collection of ad
hoc and prejudiced
strictures about language
use.
 On the contrary, the
genuine grammatical rules
of a language are the
language insofar as they
stipulate the very bedrock
of its syntactic construction
 This makes grammar somewhat of
an intimidating area of analysis for
the beginning stylistician because it
is not always easy to sort out which
aspects of a text’s many interlocking
patterns of grammar are stylistically
salient.
BASIC MODEL
OF GRAMMAR
 Most theories of
grammar accept that
grammatical units are
ordered hierarchically
according to their
size. The hierarchy is
known as a rank
scale.
Sentence (or clause
complex)
Clause
Phrase (or group)
Word
morpheme
 The clause is especially important
because it is the site of several
important functions in language:
it provides tense ;
it distinguishes between positive or
negative polarity ;
it provides the core or ‘nub’ of a
proposition in language;
and it is where information about
grammatical ‘mood’ (about whether a
clause is declarative, interrogative or
imperative) is situated.
 Subject (S)
Four Basic Predicator (P)
Elements Complement
(C)
of a Clause Adjunct (A)
Structure
 SUBJECT PREDICATOR COMPLEMENT ADJUNCT

1 The woman feeds those pigeons regularly

2 Our bull terrier was chasing the postman yesterday

3 The Professor of Necromancy would wear lipstick every Friday

4 The Aussie actress looked great in her latest film

5 The man who came to dinner was pretty miserable throughout the evening
TEST FOR CLAUSE CONSTITUENTS

Finding the It should answer the

question ‘who’ or ‘what’
Subject placed in front of the verb
It should answer the
Finding the question ‘who’ or ‘what’
Complement placed after the verb

It should answer questions

Finding the such as ‘how’, ‘when’,
Adjunct ‘where’ or ‘why’ placed after
the verb
SUBJECT PREDICATOR COMPLEMENT ADJUNCT
The woman feeds those pigeons regularly
The man who came to was pretty miserable throughout the evening
dinner

The test for Subject in example (1) – ‘who or what?

feeds those pigeons regularly’ – will confirm ‘The
woman’ as the Subject element. Alternatively, the
test for Complement in example (2) – ‘The man who
came to dinner was what? Throughout the evening’
– will confirm the adjective phrase ‘pretty
miserable’ as the Complement.
 The test involves adding a ‘tag question’ to the
declarative form of a clause. The examples provided
thus far are declarative because all of their Predicator
elements come after the Subject, in the form that is
standardly (though not always) used for making
statements. Adding a tag, which may be of positive or
negative polarity, allows the speaker or writer to alter
the function of the declarative. Thus:

(1a) The woman feeds those pigeons regularly, doesn’t

she?
(2a) Our bull terrier was chasing the postman
yesterday, was it?
 The slightly awkward thing about the
‘tag test’ is that the questioning tag
inverts the word order and often the
polarity of the original clause
constituents. However, if you have the
good fortune to be Irish, then the
Hiberno-English dialect offers an even
more straightforward mechanism for
testing elements of the clause.
 Adding an Hiberno-English emphatic
tag (eg. ‘so she does’; ‘so it was’) to
the end of a declarative will repeat the
Subject as a pronoun without affecting
word-order or changing the polarity of
the original.

The Professor of Necromancy would

wear lipstick every Friday, so she would.
 The tag test, whether in the questioning or the
emphatic form, still works even when the Subject
element is relatively ‘heavy’. In a sequence like:
Mary’s curious contention that mackerel live in
trees proved utterly unjustified.
the appending of ‘did it ?’, ‘didn’t it ?’ or ‘so it
did’ renders down to a simple pronoun the entire
sequence ‘Mary’s curious contention that
mackerel live in trees’. This structure, which
incidentally contains an embedded clause of its
own, is what forms the Subject element.
A. My aunt and my uncle visit the
farm regularly,
don’t ____________
they?/so
B.
they
The winner, a local do.
businesswoman, had donated
the prize to charity,
had she?/so
_____________
she had.
 Clearly, the application of our ‘who
or what?’ test before the verb will
reveal the
Subject elements in (A) and (B)
straightforwardly enough, but what
the tag test further reveals is that the
Subjects are of a very different order.
 COORDINATION
In (A), the two noun phrases
(‘My aunt’ and ‘my uncle’) refer
to different entities which are
brought together by the
conjunction ‘and’. Notice how the
tag will yield a plural pronoun:
‘don’t they ?’ or ‘so they do’.
 APPOSITION
In the second example, the tag
test brings out a singular
pronoun only (‘had she?’, ‘so she
had’) which shows that in fact
the two phrases ‘The winner’ and
‘a local businesswoman’ refer in
different ways to the same entity.
VARIATIONS
IN
BASIC
CLAUSE
 Other types of grammatical
mood, for example, involve
different types of clausal
patterning. A case in point is the
imperative, which is the form
typically used for requests and
commands.
 Imperative clauses like ‘Mind your
head’ or ‘Turn on the telly, please’
have no Subject element, a knock-
on effect of which is that their verb
always retains its base form and
cannot be marked for tense.
 Interrogatives, the
form typically used
for asking questions,
do contain Subject
elements. However,
many types of
interrogative
position part of the
Predicator in front of
 Does the woman feed those
pigeons regularly?
By way of footnote, the use of the verb ‘do’ for
this purpose is a relatively recent development
in the history of English language. In early
Modern English, the SP sequence was often
simply inverted to make an interrogative, as in
the following
absurdly anachronistic transposition of
Looked the Aussie actress great in her latest
film?
 Declarative clauses may themselves
display significant variation around the
basic SPCA pattern. Pared down to its
grammatical bare bones, as it were, a
clause may realise S and P elements
only, as in ‘The train arrived.’ or
‘The lesson began’.
 Occasionally a clause may
contain two Complements. This
occurs when one of the C
elements is a ‘direct object’ and
the other an ‘indirect object’, as
in ‘Mary gave her friend a book’
or ‘Bill told the children a story’.
 Adjunct elements are
many and varied in terms
of the forms they take and
of the type of information
they bring to a clause.
They basically describe the
circumstances that attach
to the process related by
the clause and for that
reason they can often be
removed without affecting
the grammaticality of the
clause as a whole.
Here is an example of a clause with an SPAAAA
pattern. Try to sort out the four Adjuncts it
contains by asking the test questions: ‘how?’
‘where?’ ‘when?’ and ‘why?’:

Mary awoke suddenly in her

hotel room one morning because
of a knock on the door.
 What the forgoing discussion illustrates is
that, strictly speaking, neither the Subject,
Complement nor Adjunct elements are
essential components of clause structure. The
situation regarding the Predicator element is
not quite so clear-cut, however, and there has
been much debate among grammarians about
the status of ‘P-less’ structures.
 Impacting on this is the fact that much
of our everyday language use involves a
type of grammatical abbreviation known
as ellipsis. For instance, if A asks ‘Where
are the keys?’ and B answers ‘In your
pocket!’, then B’s response, while lacking
a Predicator, still implicitly retains part of
the structure of the earlier question.
 In other words, even though B’s
elliptical reply amounts to no more than
a simple prepositional phrase, it still
presupposes the elements of a full-blown
clause. The term minor clause is
conventionally used to describe
structures, like this one, which lack a
Predicator element.
 RULE OF THUMB
when analysing elements which are
present in a text, there can only be
one Subject element and one
Predicator element of structure in any
given clause. There may however be
up to two Complement elements and
any number of Adjunct elements.