Book Reviews : The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Book reviews: The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Gilman

Women's Correctional Facility: Analysis of "The Yellow Wallpaper"

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story "The Yellow Wallpaper," the narrator becomes obsessed with the strange, headache-inducing wallpaper covering her bedroom in her summer home. The hallucinatory pattern slowly takes on the shape of a woman behind bars. This image represents not only the narrator's struggle, but the plight of every woman at that time in history. In 1892, when the story was written, women could not vote, own property, retains wages they may have earned, and in some cases they were even prevented from seeing their own children on the rare chance that they were able to obtain a divorce.
In this largely autobiographical tale, Gilman writes of the narrator's downward journey from a "temporary nervous disorder" to utter insanity ("Wallpaper" 61). She (the narrator) tells us that she and her husband are staying in a country estate for the summer (Gilman "Wallpaper" 60). She later reveals that her "slight hysterical tendency" is the reason for this vacation home (Gilman "Wallpaper" 61, 62). The house and grounds are large providing a perfect backdrop for the narrator's prescription of rest and relaxation and lots of air (Gilman "Wallpaper" 62). At her husband's behest, they occupy the nursery on the top floor for it's "a big, airy room" with "air and sunshine galore" (Gilman "Wallpaper" 62). However, the wallpaper is hideous, "one of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin" (Gilman "Wallpaper" 62). Even the color of the wallpaper is horrendous: "a smouldering unclean yellow" (Gilman "Wallpaper" 62). The previous occupants detested it as well, for it is torn away in great pieces around the head of the bed and in spots near the baseboards (Gilman "Wallpaper" 62).
As time goes on, the narrator begins to see shapes forming within the dizzying pattern of the wallpaper, first a pair of "bulbous eyes," then a "strange, provoking, formless sort of figure" (Gilman "Wallpaper" 64, 65). The narrator admits that she thinks often on the wallpaper and the undulating shapes beneath it. She lies in bed and follows the pattern around with her eyes (Gilman "Wallpaper" 65). She gets up in the middle of the night to try to touch it in the moonlight (Gilman "Wallpaper" 67). She thinks on it constantly, trying to figure out the riddle behind, trying to make contact with whatever lives inside of it.
Later on in the story, moonlight enhances the wallpaper, and the image is even clearer;
it's a woman behind bars (Gilman "Wallpaper" 68)! The imagery couldn't be any more obvious. The woman knows she's behind bars, and she shakes them; she "shakes them hard" (Gilman "Wallpaper" 70). She's trying to escape, to get out, to "climb through [the wallpaper]" (Gilman "Wallpaper" 71). As the figure within the yellow wallpaper becomes clearer, it isn't just a woman the narrator sees, but "a woman stooping down and creeping about" (Gilman "Wallpaper" 67). This description is particularly noteworthy because of what the language implies; a woman stooped, bent or hunched over indicates someone of older age, the crone archetype, withered, deformed, and gnarled with age. The narrator might then be envisioning her own doom, seeing what she is to become, mentally if not physically, if left to waste away not only in her madness, but also her stifling marriage.
Perhaps it isn't age that forces the woman in the wallpaper to bend over, but the strain of the way she's being forced to live, forced to conform to a patriarchal society's standards of what's right and good and proper. Only behind the pattern of the wallpaper can the woman show how the stress affects her, for in real life, a woman's posture was dictated by the unforgiving confines of a corset. The narrator herself is suffering from a similar force her marriage to a fearfully practical and patronizing man who doesn't even believe she's truly sick (Gilman "Wallpaper" 61). She is, in fact, caught in the Catch 22 of no one, not her brother (who happens to be a physician) nor even her own husband (who is her personal physician), taking her illness seriously, yet they insist on her taking "phosphates...and tonicx...and air" (Gilman "Wallpaper" 61). Her husband, in turns, laughs at her then says she must "take care of [herself] for his sake" and if she "doesn't pick up faster he shall send [her] to Weir Mitchell in the fall" (Gilman "Wallpaper" 66, 65).
Unfortunately, this pattern of contradictions is not an unusual one for women at the time. Women were told they mustn't overexcite themselves, physically or mentally; their frail bodies and weak constitutions and small brains couldn't handle the stimulation. Yet they were expected to bear and raise children, run the household, manage domestic affairs, cook, clean, sew, knit, embroider, wait on their husbands, entertain guests and family all with little to no formal education. Gilman gives evidence of this living contradiction in the very beginning of her story:
John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage" ("Wallpaper" 60). John does a lot of laughing in this story. He laughs at the narrator in regards to her original revulsion at the wallpaper (Gilman "Wallpaper" 63). He laughs at her when she insists she's not getting well at all (Gilman "Wallpaper" 68). He laughs and laughs, and in the same breath tells his wife that they came to the estate for the summer "solely on [her] account" (Gilman "Wallpaper" 62). As her physician, he tells her she is "absolutely forbidden to work'" until she's well, which means she is unable to do any of the domestic "chores" listed above, and she is made to feel like a terrible burden because of it (Gilman "Wallpaper" 63).
The constant inconsistency with these "lessons" about women and their "place" in the home during the nineteenth century is enough to drive anyone crazy, without the benefit of hideous yellow wallpaper. Gilman herself said that the story "was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy" ("Why" 9). She, too, suffered from depression and was prescribed the controversial "rest cure." A month later, the "noted specialist" who attended her case sent her home with the following medical advice: "live as domestic a life as possible, have but two hours' intellectual life a day, and never...touch [a] pen, brush, or pencil again" (Gilman "Why" 3). She followed his advice for a number of months, and consequently came close to "utter mental ruin" (Gilman "Why" 4). Then she did what many women reading "The Yellow Wallpaper" wish the narrator had done; she threw the doctor's "advice to the winds," left her husband, "and went to work again" (Gilman "Why" 5). She wrote this story and even sent a copy of it to her former doctor. Years later she found out that "the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia [after] reading The Yellow Wallpaper" (Gilman "Why" 8). Now only if her first husband could have changed his ways as well.


References:
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper." Writing about Literature: A Portable Guide. Ed. Janet E. Gardner. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2004. 60-74.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper." The Forerunner Oct. 1913

Symbolism in The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Gilman

Symbolism in The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Gilman

In The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, several symbols are used to show the oppression of women by men and the struggle against that male dominated society. While numerous symbols could be cited from the text to support this, there

 are three predominant symbols throughout the story that lend credence to the woman’s suffrage theme. The yellow wall-paper itself is symbolic of the mental screen that men attempted to place on women during the 1800s. The color yellow is often associated with sickness or weakness, and the writer’s mysterious illness is a symbol of man’s oppression of the female sex. The two windows from which the writer often peers out of, observing the world but apart from it, is representative of the possibilities of women if seen as equals by the opposite sex.

Symbolism 1
The story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, was interesting with deep symbolic undertones. The story starts out with John and his wife moving to a colonial estate for the summer. Meanwhile, the woman finds the mansion to be “a haunted house” and still she thought it had something “queer” about it. This estate and her environment have much to do with this woman’s fate. The woman just had a baby, so most of her depression could come from this big event in her life but the baby is only mentioned a few times near the beginning of the story. After she settles in the new house, the yellow wallpaper starts to bother her, which is a key turning point in this woman’s life. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is symbolic for the main character’s sanity and her entrapment, physically and mentally.

As the story progresses, so does the main character. The main character that speaks in first person, believes that she is sick. John, her husband, as well as her brother are both physicians. They two believe she is sick. John on the other hand treats his wife with an almost demeaning attitude, calling her “little girl” and “little goose”. He treats her as a child at times, plus doesn’t really listen

Symbolism 2
The yellow wallpaper acts like a mental entrapment for the main character. At the end of the story, the main character rips down the yellow wallpaper to release the woman behind the paper. This was symbolic because even though she saw a woman, this woman was her. When the narrator was angry she put that onto the wallpaper, so that is why she ripped the wallpaper down. She was trapped behind the pattern and she couldn’t move from it. This is the point where her sickness has gotten to the worst extent. This woman is full on crazy now. The wallpaper led her to create her own madness. The main character says in the story, “There are things in the wallpaper that nobody knows about but me, or ever will.” (600). Not even John knew what was really going on because he was always working and never took his wife’s thoughts too seriously.

The yellow wallpaper also acts as physical entrapment to the main character. The wallpaper blocks her into that small room. She feels like she cannot get better in that room. In a sense she can’t get better in that room because of the things preventing her from resting. Her eyes are constantly on the yellow wallpaper. Forcing her to scrutinize the detailed pattern. Her mind also feels she cannot step away from the wallpaper.

The underlying symbol of the yellow wallpaper is the main character’s sanity. As the wallpaper changes so does the character’s attitude towards herself. When the character changes or progresses so does the main character

Symbolism 3
.The yellow wallpaper itself is the most obvious symbol in this story. The wallpaper represents the protagonist's mind set during this time. It further symbolizes the way women were perceived during the 19th century. The wallpaper cannot be categorized into any particular "type". It contains patterns, angles, and curves that all contradict one another, and it can be seen the same could be said for the wife's emotions during this time.
The nursery is a symbol of the way women of this time were seen as being on the same level as children. The barred windows are symbols of the confinement of women during this time with respect to the perception of what a woman's role was.

Symbolism 4
As for symbolic actions, the narrator's tearing down the wallpaper in an attempt to find the "woman" in the wallpaper represents her struggle to retain or regain her sanity.  The wallpaper has been part of her confinement and by her tearing it down, she is freeing herself from that confinement.
Another symbol is the narrator's writings in her notebook and the notebook itself.  Both represent the narrator's attempt to have normalcy and sanity during this horrible ordeal of being locked in her room.  Despite being told by her husband that he wants to limit the amount of time she uses to write, she continues to write more behind his back and this is her tie to her own sanity and sense of reality (whatever her reality is at this time).

The Yellow Wallpaper ( POV )

Point of View in yellow Wallpaper

From the beginning of the story forward the narrator speaks of how her husband and other influential men in her life direct her so that she will recover quickly and I believe this to be the initial sign that the feminist perspective will be presented throughout. The narrator shows how although she has a formed opinion (and probably successful idea for her treatment), she is still swayed by her husband's direction with the following passage, "I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus--but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad." Her husband seems to be the one who can change her thoughts because of his 'maleness' or the fact that he is her husband. Nonetheless, she is still being suppressed by a member of the opposing sex.

With a further look into this passage though, I believe that this again is nothing more than a sign of the inablities of the narrator. I don't believe her sex to be the cause of her suppression it is her lack of understanding of not only herself, but of how to successfully make others aware of what is best for herself.

The narrator also speaks many times in a manner which suggests that because a man speaks she has no means by which to disagree with him because she is a woman, yet another feminist tact. A perfect example of this is presented in the beginning passages of the story, where the narrator states "Personally, I disagree with their (her husband's and brother's) ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good. But what is one to do?" This last sentence "But what is one to do?" exemplifies wonderfully her oppressed female stature in the society of her life.

The proceeding passage is yet another display of the woman's ineptness with self-esteem. If the woman would just take a moment to assess the fact that she is quite possibly right about her own recovery even though she is a woman the conflict would immediately taken from the sexist realm to a realm of inner-conflict, which is were I believe many of the topics covered in this story belong.

The final passages of the story, at last, successfully manifest a display of power and possible regain of self-governance through the narrator's finally standing up to her husband by locking him out of the room in which he has imprisoned her supposedly for her benefit. Where upon, for the first time in the story he must listen to her entreaties to discover where the key is hidden.

The proceeding assessment of the final moments of the story could quite possibly be a successful way in which the author intended to say much, after the fact, of how she understood the need for a woman to stand up for her rights even in the face of a man's believed superiority. This is an astute revelation considering that at that time men were still the magistrates and governors of women's lives and for the author to make such an observation was in itself unorthodox for the day. This passage serves a two-fold purpose. The ability to lock the door restores the narrator's power over her environment at the very least, and possibly her inner domains as well. The husband having to pay attention to the wife so that he may once again be with her also displays that she may finally be getting through to her husband, that the manner in which he can help her most is to listen to her and try to understand her.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" presents a very interesting perspective of how a man can influence a woman's life from a very feminist point of view, but with a present day interpretation can be given a whole new depth because the many conflicts flow from being woman vs. man to a much more complex struggle of woman vs. herself so that she may successfully win the battle of person vs. society. Gilman successfully portrays a dominated woman in this story, but I believe that is all the narrator is, a dominated woman not a woman dominated by a man. Gilman does portray the man as insensitive and lacking in emotional support, but neither of these qualities imply or affect dominant characteristics. I believe that in the end the woman discovers that she is not being dominated as much as allowing herself loss of control. The discovering of where control falls in this story is very interesting when compared with literature in general. Much as the narrator comes to the realization that control over her life is ultimately her responsibility, a reader, who often times is 'controlled' by a story, must come to the realization that a work of literature only becomes a personal experience when he/she finally determines his/her interpretation or 'control' over the story. It is this realization of control or the reader's interpretation that is the final block that gives the building that is known as a story, depth and meaning to every reader.

Introduction To Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific^[1][2] study of natural language.^[3][4] Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure (grammar) and the study of meaning (semantics and pragmatics). Grammar encompasses morphology (the formation and composition of words), syntax (the rules that determine how words combine into phrases and sentences) and phonology (the study of sound systems and abstract sound units). Phonetics is a related branch of linguistics concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds (phones), non-speech sounds, and how they are produced and perceived. Other sub-disciplines of linguistics include the following: evolutionary linguistics, which considers the origins of language; historical linguistics, which explores language change; sociolinguistics, which looks at the relation between linguistic variation and social structures; psycholinguistics, which explores the representation and functioning of language in the mind; neurolinguistics, which looks at the representation of language in the brain; language acquisition, which considers how children acquire their first language and how children and adults acquire and learn their second and subsequent languages; and discourse analysis, which is concerned with the structure of texts and conversations, and pragmatics with how meaning is transmitted based on a combination of linguistic competence, non-linguistic knowledge, and the context of the speech act.

Linguistics is narrowly defined as the scientific approach to the study of language, but language can, of course, be approached from a variety of directions, and a number of other intellectual disciplines are relevant to it and influence its study. Semiotics, for example, is a related field concerned with the general study of signs and symbols both in language and outside of it. Literary theorists study the use of language in artistic literature. Linguistics additionally draws on work from such diverse fields as psychology, speech-language pathology, informatics, computer science, philosophy, biology, human anatomy, neuroscience, sociology, anthropology, and acoustics.

Within the field, linguist is used to describe someone who either studies the field or uses linguistic methodologies to study groups of languages or particular languages. Outside the field, this term is commonly used to refer to people who speak many languages or have a great vocabulary.

Names for the discipline

Before the twentieth century, the term "philology", first attested in 1716,^[5] was commonly used to refer to the science of language, which was then predominantly historical in focus.^[6] Since Ferdinand de Saussure's insistence on the importance of synchronic analysis, however, this focus has shifted^[7] and the term "philology" is now generally used for the "study of a language's grammar, history and literary tradition," especially in the United States,^[8] where it was never as popular as it was elsewhere (in the sense of the "science of language").^[5]

Although the term "linguist" in the sense of "a student of language" dates from 1641,^[9] the term "linguistics" is first attested in 1847.^[9] It is now the usual academic term in English for the scientific study of language.

Fundamental concerns and divisions

Linguistics concerns itself with describing and explaining the nature of human language. Relevant to this are the questions of what is universal to language, how language can vary, and how human beings come to know languages. All humans (setting aside extremely pathological cases) achieve competence in whatever language is spoken (or signed, in the case of signed languages) around them when growing up, with apparently little need for explicit conscious instruction. While non-humans acquire their own communication systems, they do not acquire human language in this way (although many non-human animals can learn to respond to language, or can even be trained to use it to a degree).^[10] Therefore, linguists assume that the ability to acquire and use language is an innate, biologically-based potential of modern human beings, similar to the ability to walk. There is no consensus, however, as to the extent of this innate potential, or its domain-specificity (the degree to which such innate abilities are specific to language), with some theorists claiming that there is a very large set of highly abstract and specific binary settings coded into the human brain, while others claim that the ability to learn language is a product of general human cognition. It is, however, generally agreed that there are no strong genetic differences underlying the differences between languages: an individual will acquire whatever language(s) he or she is exposed to as a child, regardless of parentage or ethnic origin.^[11]

Linguistic structures are pairings of meaning and form; such pairings are known as Saussurean signs. In this sense, form may consist of sound patterns, movements of the hands, written symbols, and so on. There are many sub-fields concerned with particular aspects of linguistic structure, ranging from those focused primarily on form to those focused primarily on meaning:

• Phonetics, the study of the physical properties of speech (or signed) production and perception
• Phonology, the study of sounds (or signs) as discrete, abstract elements in the speaker's mind that distinguish meaning
• Morphology, the study of internal structures of words and how they can be modified
• Syntax, the study of how words combine to form grammatical sentences
• Semantics, the study of the meaning of words (lexical semantics) and fixed word combinations (phraseology), and how these combine to form the meanings of sentences
• Pragmatics, the study of how utterances are used in communicative acts, and the role played by context and non-linguistic knowledge in the transmission of meaning
• Discourse analysis, the analysis of language use in texts (spoken, written, or signed)

Many linguists would agree that these divisions overlap considerably, and the independent significance of each of these areas is not universally acknowledged. Regardless of any particular linguist's position, each area has core concepts that foster significant scholarly inquiry and research.

Alongside these structurally-motivated domains of study are other fields of linguistics, distinguished by the kinds of non-linguistic factors that they consider:

• Applied linguistics, the study of language-related issues applied in everyday life, notably language policies, planning, and education. (Constructed language fits under Applied linguistics.)
• Biolinguistics, the study of natural as well as human-taught communication systems in animals, compared to human language.
• Clinical linguistics, the application of linguistic theory to the field of Speech-Language Pathology.
• Computational linguistics, the study of computational implementations of linguistic structures.
• Developmental linguistics, the study of the development of linguistic ability in individuals, particularly the acquisition of language in childhood.
• Evolutionary linguistics, the study of the origin and subsequent development of language by the human species.
• Historical linguistics or diachronic linguistics, the study of language change over time.
• Language geography, the study of the geographical distribution of languages and linguistic features.
• Linguistic typology, the study of the common properties of diverse unrelated languages, properties that may, given sufficient attestation, be assumed to be innate to human language capacity.
• Neurolinguistics, the study of the structures in the human brain that underlie grammar and communication.
• Psycholinguistics, the study of the cognitive processes and representations underlying language use.
• Sociolinguistics, the study of variation in language and its relationship with social factors.
• Stylistics, the study of linguistic factors that place a discourse in context.

The related discipline of semiotics investigates the relationship between signs and what they signify. From the perspective of semiotics, language can be seen as a sign or symbol, with the world as its representation.^{[citation needed]}

Variation and universality

Much modern linguistic research, particularly within the paradigm of generative grammar, has concerned itself with trying to account for differences between languages of the world. This has worked on the assumption that if human linguistic ability is narrowly constrained by human biology, then all languages must share certain fundamental properties.

In generativist theory, the collection of fundamental properties all languages share are referred to as universal grammar (UG). The specific characteristics of this universal grammar are a much debated topic. Typologists and non-generativist linguists usually refer simply to language universals, or universals of language.

Similarities between languages can have a number of different origins. In the simplest case, universal properties may be due to universal aspects of human experience. For example, all humans experience water, and all human languages have a word for water. Other similarities may be due to common descent: the Latin language spoken by the Ancient Romans developed into Spanish in Spain and Italian in Italy; similarities between Spanish and Italian are thus in many cases due to both being descended from Latin. In other cases, contact between languages — particularly where many speakers are bilingual — can lead to much borrowing of structures, as well as words. Similarity may also, of course, be due to coincidence. English much and Spanish mucho are not descended from the same form or borrowed from one language to the other;^[12] nor is the similarity due to innate linguistic knowledge (see False cognate).

Arguments in favor of language universals have also come from documented cases of sign languages (such as Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language) developing in communities of congenitally deaf people, independently of spoken language. The properties of these sign languages conform generally to many of the properties of spoken languages. Other known and suspected sign language isolates include Kata Kolok, Nicaraguan Sign Language, and Providence Island Sign Language.

Structures

It has been perceived that languages tend to be organized around grammatical categories such as noun and verb, nominative and accusative, or present and past, though, importantly, not exclusively so. The grammar of a language is organized around such fundamental categories, though many languages express the relationships between words and syntax in other discrete ways (cf. some Bantu languages for noun/verb relations, ergative-absolutive systems for case relations, several Native American languages for tense/aspect relations).

In addition to making substantial use of discrete categories, language has the important property that it organizes elements into recursive structures; this allows, for example, a noun phrase to contain another noun phrase (as in "the chimpanzee's lips") or a clause to contain a clause (as in "I think that it's raining"). Though recursion in grammar was implicitly recognized much earlier (for example by Jespersen), the importance of this aspect of language became more popular after the 1957 publication of Noam Chomsky's book Syntactic Structures,^[13] which presented a formal grammar of a fragment of English. Prior to this, the most detailed descriptions of linguistic systems were of phonological or morphological systems.

Chomsky used a context-free grammar augmented with transformations. Since then, following the trend of Chomskyan linguistics, context-free grammars have been written for substantial fragments of various languages (for example GPSG, for English). It has been demonstrated, however, that human languages (most notably Dutch and Swiss German) include cross-serial dependencies, which cannot be handled adequately by context-free grammars.^[14]

Selected sub-fields

Historical linguistics

Main article: Historical Linguistics

Historical linguistics studies the history and evolution of languages through the comparative method. Often the aim of historical linguistics is to classify languages in language families descending from a common ancestor. This evolves comparison of elements in different languages to detect possible cognates in order to be able to reconstruct how different languages have changed over time. This also involves the study of etymology, the study of the history of single words. Historical linguistics is also called "diachronic linguistics" and is opposed to "synchronic linguistics" that study languages in a given moment in time without regarding its previous stages.In universities in the United States, the historic perspective is often out of fashion. Historical linguistics was among the first linguistic disciplines to emerge and was the most widely practiced form of linguistics in the late 19th century. The shift in focus to a synchronic perspective started with Saussure and became predominant in western linguistics with Noam Chomsky's emphasis on the study of the synchronic and universal aspects of language.

Semiotics

Main article: Semiotics

Semiotics is the study of sign processes (semiosis), or signification and communication, signs and symbols, both individually and grouped into sign systems, including the study of how meaning is constructed and understood. Semioticians often do not restrict themselves to linguistic communication when studying the use of signs but extend the meaning of "sign" to cover all kinds of cultural symbols. Nonetheless semiotic disciplines closely related to linguistics are literary studies, discourse analysis, text linguistics, and philosophy of language.

Descriptive linguistics and language documentation

Main article: Descriptive linguistics

Since the inception of the discipline of linguistics linguists have been concerned with describing and documenting languages previously unknown to science. Starting with Franz Boas in the early 1900s descriptive linguistics became the main strand within American linguistics until the rise of formal structural linguistics in the mid 20th century. The rise of American descriptive linguistics was caused by the concern with describing the languages of indigenous peoples that were (and are) rapidly moving towards extinction. The ethnographic focus of the original Boasian type of descriptive linguistics occasioned the development of disciplines such as Sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, and linguistic anthropology, disciplines that investigate the relations between language, culture and society.

The emphasis on linguistic description and documentation has since become more important outside of North America as well, as the documentation of rapidly dying indigenous languages has become a primary focus in many of the worlds' linguistics programs. Language description is a work intensive endeavour usually requiring years of field work for the linguist to learn a language sufficiently well to write a reference grammar of it. The further task of language documentation requires the linguist to collect a preferably large corpus of texts and recordings of sound and video in the language, and to arrange for its storage in accessible formats in open repositories where it may be of the best use for further research by other researchers.^[15]

Applied linguistics

Main article: Applied linguistics

Linguists are largely concerned with finding and describing the generalities and varieties both within particular languages and among all language. Applied linguistics takes the result of those findings and "applies" them to other areas. The term "applied linguistics" is often used to refer to the use of linguistic research in language teaching only^{[citation needed]}, but results of linguistic research are used in many other areas as well, such as lexicography and translation. "Applied linguistics" has been argued to be something of a misnomer^[who?], since applied linguists focus on making sense of and engineering solutions for real-world linguistic problems, not simply "applying" existing technical knowledge from linguistics; moreover, they commonly apply technical knowledge from multiple sources, such as sociology (e.g. conversation analysis) and anthropology.

Today, computers are widely used in many areas of applied linguistics. Speech synthesis and speech recognition use phonetic and phonemic knowledge to provide voice interfaces to computers. Applications of computational linguistics in machine translation, computer-assisted translation, and natural language processing are areas of applied linguistics which have come to the forefront. Their influence has had an effect on theories of syntax and semantics, as modeling syntactic and semantic theories on computers constraints.

Linguistic analysis is a subdiscipline of applied linguistics used by many governments to verify the claimed nationality of people seeking asylum who do not hold the necessary documentation to prove their claim.^[16] This often takes the form of an interview by personnel in an immigration department. Depending on the country, this interview is conducted in either the asylum seeker's native language through an interpreter, or in an international lingua franca like English.^[16] Australia uses the former method, while Germany employs the latter; the Netherlands uses either method depending on the languages involved.^[16] Tape recordings of the interview then undergo language analysis, which can be done by either private contractors or within a department of the government. In this analysis, linguistic features of the asylum seeker are used by analysts to make a determination about the speaker's nationality. The reported findings of the linguistic analysis can play a critical role in the government's decision on the refugee status of the asylum seeker.^[16]

Description and prescription

Main articles: Descriptive linguistics, Linguistic prescription

Linguistics is descriptive; linguists describe and explain features of language without making subjective judgments on whether a particular feature is "right" or "wrong". This is analogous to practice in other sciences: a zoologist studies the animal kingdom without making subjective judgments on whether a particular animal is better or worse than another.

Prescription, on the other hand, is an attempt to promote particular linguistic usages over others, often favouring a particular dialect or "acrolect". This may have the aim of establishing a linguistic standard, which can aid communication over large geographical areas. It may also, however, be an attempt by speakers of one language or dialect to exert influence over speakers of other languages or dialects (see Linguistic imperialism). An extreme version of prescriptivism can be found among censors, who attempt to eradicate words and structures which they consider to be destructive to society.

Speech and writing

Most contemporary linguists work under the assumption that spoken (or signed) language is more fundamental than written language. This is because:

• Speech appears to be universal to all human beings capable of producing and hearing it, while there have been many cultures and speech communities that lack written communication;
• Speech evolved before human beings invented writing;
• People learn to speak and process spoken languages more easily and much earlier than writing;

Linguists nonetheless agree that the study of written language can be worthwhile and valuable. For research that relies on corpus linguistics and computational linguistics, written language is often much more convenient for processing large amounts of linguistic data. Large corpora of spoken language are difficult to create and hard to find, and are typically transcribed and written. Additionally, linguists have turned to text-based discourse occurring in various formats of computer-mediated communication as a viable site for linguistic inquiry.

The study of writing systems themselves is in any case considered a branch of linguistics.

History

Main article: History of linguistics

Some of the earliest linguistic activities can be recalled from Iron Age India with the analysis of Sanskrit. The Pratishakhyas (from ca. the 8th century BC) constitute as it were a proto-linguistic ad hoc collection of observations about mutations to a given corpus particular to a given Vedic school. Systematic study of these texts gives rise to the Vedanga discipline of Vyakarana, the earliest surviving account of which is the work of Pānini (c. 520 – 460 BC), who, however, looks back on what are probably several generations of grammarians, whose opinions he occasionally refers to. Pānini formulates close to 4,000 rules which together form a compact generative grammar of Sanskrit. Inherent in his analytic approach are the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme and the root. Due to its focus on brevity, his grammar has a highly unintuitive structure, reminiscent of contemporary "machine language" (as opposed to "human readable" programming languages).

Indian linguistics maintained a high level for several centuries; Patanjali in the 2nd century BC still actively criticizes Panini. In the later centuries BC, however, Panini's grammar came to be seen as prescriptive, and commentators came to be fully dependent on it. Bhartrihari (c. 450 – 510) theorized the act of speech as being made up of four stages: first, conceptualization of an idea, second, its verbalization and sequencing (articulation) and third, delivery of speech into atmospheric air, the interpretation of speech by the listener, the interpreter.

Western linguistics begins in Classical Antiquity with grammatical speculation such as Plato's Cratylus. The first important advancement of the Greeks was the creation of the alphabet. As a result of the introduction of writing, poetry such as the Homeric poems became written and several editions were created and commented, forming the basis of philology and critic. The sophists and Socrates introduced dialectics as a new text genre. Aristotle defined the logic of speech and the argument. Furthermore Aristotle works on rhetoric and poetics were of utmost importance for the understating of tragedy, poetry, public discussions etc. as text genres.

One of the greatest of the Greek grammarians was Apollonius Dyscolus.^[17] Apollonius wrote more than thirty treatises on questions of syntax, semantics, morphology, prosody, orthography, dialectology, and more. In the 4th c., Aelius Donatus compiled the Latin grammar Ars Grammatica that was to be the defining school text through the Middle Ages.^[18] In De vulgari eloquentia ("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"), Dante Alighieri expanded the scope of linguistic enquiry from the traditional languages of antiquity to include the language of the day.^{[citation needed]}

In the Middle East, the Persian linguist Sibawayh made a detailed and professional description of Arabic in 760, in his monumental work, Al-kitab fi al-nahw (الكتاب في النحو, The Book on Grammar), bringing many linguistic aspects of language to light. In his book he distinguished phonetics from phonology.^{[citation needed]}

Sir William Jones noted that Sanskrit shared many common features with classical Latin and Greek, notably verb roots and grammatical structures, such as the case system. This led to the theory that all languages sprung from a common source and to the discovery of the Indo-European language family. He began the study of comparative linguistics, which would uncover more language families and branches.

In 19th century Europe the study of linguistics was largely from the perspective of philology (or historical linguistics). Some early-19th-century linguists were Jakob Grimm, who devised a principle of consonantal shifts in pronunciation – known as Grimm's Law – in 1822; Karl Verner, who formulated Verner's Law; August Schleicher, who created the "Stammbaumtheorie" ("family tree"); and Johannes Schmidt, who developed the "Wellentheorie" ("wave model") in 1872.

Ferdinand de Saussure was the founder of modern structural linguistics, with an emphasis on synchronic (i.e. non-historical) explanations for language form.

In North America, the structuralist tradition grew out of a combination of missionary linguistics (whose goal was to translate the bible) and Anthropology. While originally regarded as a sub-field of anthropology in the United States,^[19][20] linguistics is now considered a separate scientific discipline in the US, Australia and much of Europe.

Edward Sapir, a leader in American structural linguistics, was one of the first who explored the relations between language studies and anthropology. His methodology had strong influence on all his successors. Noam Chomsky's formal model of language, transformational-generative grammar, developed under the influence of his teacher Zellig Harris, who was in turn strongly influenced by Leonard Bloomfield, has been the dominant model since the 1960s.

The structural linguistics period was largely superseded in North America by generative grammar in the 1950s and 60s. This paradigm views language as a mental object, and emphasizes the role of the formal modeling of universal and language specific rules. Noam Chomsky remains an important but controversial linguistic figure. Generative grammar gave rise to such frameworks such as Transformational grammar, Generative Semantics, Relational Grammar, Generalized Phrase-structure Grammar, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). Other linguists working in Optimality Theory state generalizations in terms of violable constraints that interact with each other, and abandon the traditional rule-based formalism first pioneered by early work in generativist linguistics.

Functionalist linguists working in functional grammar and Cognitive Linguistics tend to stress the non-autonomy of linguistic knowledge and the non-universality of linguistic structures, thus differing significantly from the formal approaches.

Schools of study

There are a wide variety of approaches to linguistic study. These can be loosely divided (although not without controversy) into formalist and functionalist approaches. Formalist approaches stress the importance of linguistic forms, and seek explanations for the structure of language from within the linguistic system itself. For example, the fact that language shows recursion might be attributed to recursive rules. Functionalist linguists by contrast view the structure of language as being driven by its function. For example, the fact that languages often put topical information first in the sentence, may be due to a communicative need to pair old information with new information in discourse.

Generative grammar

Main article: Generative grammar

During the last half of the twentieth century, following the work of Noam Chomsky, linguistics was dominated by the generativist school. While formulated by Chomsky in part as a way to explain how human beings acquire language and the biological constraints on this acquisition, in practice it has largely been concerned with giving formal accounts of specific phenomena in natural languages. Generative theory is modularist and formalist in character. Formal linguistics remains the dominant paradigm for studying linguistics,^[21] though Chomsky's writings have also gathered much criticism.

Cognitive linguistics

Main article: Cognitive linguistics

In the 1970s and 1980s, a new school of thought known as cognitive linguistics emerged as a reaction to generativist theory. Led by theorists such as Ronald Langacker and George Lakoff, linguists working within the realm of cognitive linguistics posit that language is an emergent property of basic, general-purpose cognitive processes, though cognitive linguistics has also been the subject of much criticism.^[22] In contrast to the generativist school of linguistics, cognitive linguistics is non-modularist and functionalist in character. Important developments in cognitive linguistics include cognitive grammar, frame semantics, and conceptual metaphor, all of which are based on the idea that form-function correspondences based on representations derived from embodied experience constitute the basic units of language.

Define : English Grammar....

English grammar is here understood as the body of rules describing the properties of the English language. A language is such that its elements must be combined according to certain patterns. This article is concerned with (and restricted to) morphology, the building blocks of language, and syntax, the construction of meaningful phrases, clauses and sentences with the use of morphemes and words.

The grammar of any language is commonly approached in two different ways: A descriptivist, usually based on a systematic analysis of a large text corpus and describing grammatical structures thereupon; and a prescriptivist, which attempts to use the identified rules of a given language as a tool to govern the linguistic behaviour of speakers (see Linguistic prescription and Descriptive linguistics). Prescriptive grammar concerns itself with several open disputes in English grammar, often representing changes in usage over time.

There are a number of historical, social and regional variations of the English language. For example, British English and American English have several lexical differences; however, the grammatical differences are not equally conspicuous, and will be mentioned only when appropriate. Further, the many dialects of English have divergences from the grammar described here; they are only cursorily mentioned. This article describes a generalized present-day Standard English, the form of speech found in types of public discourse including broadcasting, education, entertainment, government, and news reporting. Standard English includes both formal and informal speech.

Word classes and phrase classes

Seven major word classes are described here. These are: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and determiner. The first six are traditionally referred to as "parts of speech." There are minor word classes, such as interjections, but these do not fit into the clause and sentence structure of English.^[1]

Open and closed classes

Open word classes allow new members; closed word classes seldom do.^[1] Nouns such as "celebutante," (a celebrity who frequents the fashion circles)" and "mentee," (a person advised by a mentor) and adverbs such as "24/7" ("I am working on it 24/7") are relatively new words; nouns and adverbs are therefore open classes.^[1] However, the pronoun, "their," as a gender-neutral singular replacement for the "his or her" (as in: "Each new arrival should check in their luggage.") has not gained complete acceptance during the more than 40 years of its life; pronouns, in consequence, form a closed class.^[1]

Word classes and grammatical forms

A word can sometimes belong to several word classes. The class version of a word is called a "lexeme."^[2] For example, the word "run" is usually a verb, but it can also be a noun ("It is a ten mile run to Tipperary."); these are two different lexemes.^[2] Further, the same lexeme may have several grammatical forms: for example, as a verb lexeme, "run" has several finite forms such as "runs," "ran," and "running."^[2] Words in one class can sometimes be derived from those in another and new words be created. The noun "aerobics," for example, has recently given rise to the adjective "aerobicized" ("the aerobicized bodies of Beverly Hills celebutantes."^[2])

Phrase classes

Words combine to form phrases which themselves can take on the attributes of a word class. These classes are called phrase classes.^[2] The phrase: "The ancient pulse of germ and birth" functions as a noun in the sentence: "The ancient pulse of germ and birth was shrunken hard and dry." (Thomas Hardy, The Darkling Thrush) It is therefore a noun phrase. Other phrase classes are: verb phrases, adjective phrases, adverb phrases, prepositional phrases, and determiner phrases.^[2]

Nouns and determiners

Nouns form the largest word class. According to Carter and McCarthy, they denote "classes and categories of things in the world, including people, animals, inanimate things, places, events, qualities and states."^[2] Consequently, the words, "Mandela," "jaguar," "mansion," "volcano," "Timbuktoo," "blockade," "mercy," and "liquid" are all nouns. Nouns are not commonly identified by their form; however, some common suffixes such as "-age" ("shrinkage"), "-hood" ("sisterhood"), "-ism" ("journalism"), "-ist" ("lyricist"), "-ment" ("adornment"), "-ship" ("companionship"), "-tude" ("latitude"), and so forth, are usually identifiers of nouns.^[2] There are exceptions, of course: "assuage" and "disparage" are verbs; "augment" is a verb, "lament" can be a verb; and "worship" is a verb. Nouns can also be created by conversion of verbs or adjectives. Examples include the nouns in: "a boring talk," "a five-week run," "the long caress," "the utter disdain," and so forth.

Number, gender, type, and syntactic features.

Nouns have singular and plural forms.^[3] Many plural forms have -s or -es endings (dog/dogs, referee/referees, bush/bushes), but by no means all (woman/women, axis/axes, medium/media). Unlike some other languages, in English, nouns do not have grammatical gender, one that affects the form the verb in a sentence.^[3] However, many nouns can refer to masculine or feminine animate objects (mother/father, tiger/tigress, alumnus/alumna, male/female).^[3] Nouns can be classified semantically, i.e. by their meanings: common nouns ("sugar," "maple," "syrup," "wood"), proper nouns ("Cyrus," "China"), concrete nouns ("book," "laptop"), and abstract nouns ("heat," "prejudice").^[3] Alternatively, they can distinguished grammatically: count nouns ("clock," "city," "color") and non-count nouns ("milk," "decor," "foliage").^[4] Nouns have several syntactic features that can aid in their identification.^[4] Nouns (example: common noun "cat") may be

1. modified by adjectives ("the beautiful Angora cat"),
2. preceded by determiners ("the beautiful Angora cat"), or
3. pre-modified by other nouns ("the beautiful Angora cat").^[4]

Noun phrases

Noun phrases are phrases that function grammatically as nouns within sentences. In addition, nouns serve as "heads," or main words of noun phrases. ^[4] Examples (the heads are in boldface):

1. "The burnt-out ends of smoky days."^[5]
2. "The real raw-knuckle boys who know what fighting means, ..."^[6]
3. "The idle spear and shield ..."^[7]

The head can have modifiers, a complement, or both. Modifiers can occur before the head ("The real raw-knuckle boys ...," or "The burnt-out ends ..." and they are then called pre-modifiers; or, they can occur after the head ("who know what fighting means ...") and are called post-modifiers.^[4] Example: "The rough, seamy-faced, raw-boned College Servitor ..."^[8] The pre-modifying phrase, for example, is composed of determiners ("The"), adjectives ("rough," "seamy-faced," ...) and other nouns ("College").

Complements occur after the head as well; however, they are essential for completing the meaning of the noun phrase in a way that post-modifiers are not.^[9] Examples (complements are italicized; heads are in boldface):

1. "The burnt-out ends of smoky days."^[10]
2. "The suggestion that Mr. Touchett should invite me appeared to have come from Miss Stackpole."^[11]
3. "The ancient pulse of germ and birth was shrunken hard and dry."^[12]

Within a sentence, a noun phrase can be a part of the grammatical subject, the object, or the complement. Examples (the noun phrase is italicized, and the head boldfaced):^[9]

1. grammatical subject: "Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest."^[13]
2. object: "Dr. Pavlov ... delivered many long propaganda harangues ..."^[14])
3. complement: "'All they see is some frumpy, wrinkled-up person passing by in a carriage waving at a crowd."^[15]

Verbs

Verbs form the second largest word class after nouns. According to Carter and McCarthy, verbs denote "actions, events, processes, and states."^[16] Consequently, "smile," "stab," "climb," "confront," "liquefy," "wake," "reflect" are all verbs. Some endings, which while not dead giveaways, are often associated with verbs. Examples are: "-ate" ("formulate"), "-iate" ("inebriate"), "-ify" ("electrify"), and "-ize" ("sermonize").^[16] There are exceptions, of course: "chocolate" is a noun, "immediate" is an adjective, "prize" can be a noun, and "maize" is a noun. Prefixes can also be used to create new verbs. Examples are: "un-" ("unmask"), "out-" ("outlast"), "over-" ("overtake"), and "under-" ("undervalue").^[16] Just as nouns can be formed from verbs by conversion, the reverse is also possible:^[16]

• "so are the sons of men snared in an evil time"^[17]
• "[a national convention] nosed parliament in the very seat of its authority"^[18]

Verbs can also be formed from adjectives:^[16]

• "To dry the old oak's sap, and cherish springs."^[19]
• "Time's glory is to calm contending kings"^[20]

Regular and irregular verbs

A verb is said to be regular if its base form does not change when inflections are added to create new forms.^[21] An example is: base form: climb; present form: climb; -s form: climbs; -ing form: climbing; past form: climbed; -ed participle: climbed.^[21] Irregular verbs are ones in which the base form changes; the endings corresponding to each form are not always unique.^[21] Examples:

• base form: catch; present form: catch; -s form: catches; -ing form: catching; past form: caught; -ed participle: caught.
• base form: choose; present form: choose; -s form: chooses; -ing form: choosing; past form: chose; -ed participle: chosen.

The verb "be" is the only verb in English which has distinct inflectional forms for each of the categories of grammatical forms: base form: be; present form: am, are; -s form: is; -ing form: being; past form: was, were; -ed participle: been.^[21]

Type and characteristics

Verbs come in three grammatical types: lexical, auxiliary, and modal.^[22] Lexical verbs form an open class which includes most verbs (state, action, processes, and events). For example, "dive," "soar," "swoon," "revive," "breathe," "choke," "lament," "celebrate," "consider," "ignore" are all lexical verbs.^[22] Auxiliary verbs form a closed class consisting of only three members: be, do, and have.^[22] Although auxiliary verbs are lexical verbs as well, their main function is to add information to other lexical verbs. This information indicates (a) aspect (progressive, perfect), (b) passive voice, and (c) clause type (interrogative, negative).^[22] In the following examples, the auxiliary is in boldface and the lexical verb is italicized.

1. aspect (progressive): "'She is breathing Granny; we've got to make her keep it up, that's all—just keep her breathing."^[23]
2. aspect (perfect): "'Yes, I want a coach,' said Maurice, and bade the coachman draw up to the stone where the poor man who had swooned was sitting."^[24]
3. passive voice: "When she was admitted into the house Beautiful, care was taken to inquire into the religious knowledge of her children."^[25]
4. clause type (interrogative): (Old joke) Boy: "Excuse me sir, How do I get to Carnegie Hall?" Man on street: "Practice, Practice, Practice."
5. clause type (negative): Wasn't she monstrously surprised?"^[26]

Modal verbs also form a closed class which consists of the core modals ("can," "could," "shall," "should," "will," "would," "may," "might," "must"), semi-modals ("dare," "need," "ought to," "used to"), and modal expressions ("be able to," "have to").^[22] Modals add information to lexical verbs about degrees of certainty and necessity.^[22] Examples:

• less certain: "Before the snow could melt for good, an ice storm covered the lowcountry and we learned the deeper treachery of ice."^[27]
• more certain: "Eat your eggs in Lent and the snow will melt. That's what I say to our people when they get noisy over their cups at San Gallo ..."^[28]
• expressing necessity: "But I should think there must be some stream somewhere about. The snow must melt; besides, these great herds of deer must drink somewhere."^[29]

Modal verbs do not inflect for person, number or tense.^[22] Examples:

• person: "I/you/she might consider it."
• number: "I/We/She/They might consider it"
• tense: "They might have considered/be considering/have been considering it."

Verbs too have features that aid in their recognition:

1. they follow the (grammatical) subject noun phrase (in italics): "The real raw-knuckle boys who know what fighting means enter the arena without fanfare."
2. they agree with the subject noun phrase in number: "The real raw-knuckle boy/boys who knows/know what fighting means enters/enter the arena without fanfare."
3. they agree with the subject noun phrase in person: "I/He, the real raw-knuckle boy who knows what fighting means, enter/enters the arena without fanfare", and
4. with the exception of modal verbs, they can express tense:"The boys ... had been entering the arena without fanfare."

Verb phrases

Forms

Verb phrases are formed entirely of verbs. The verbs can be lexical, auxiliary, and modal. The head is the first verb in the verb phrase.^[30] Example:

• "I didn't notice Rowen around tonight," remarked Don, as they began to prepare for bed. "Might have been sulking in his tent," grinned Terry."^[31] Here, the verb phrase "might have been sulking" has the form "modal-auxiliary-auxiliary-lexical."

In a verb phrase, the modal comes first, then the auxiliary or several auxiliaries, and finally the lexical (main) verb.^[30] When a verb phrase has a combination of modal and auxiliaries, it is constituted usually in the following order: modal verb >> perfect have >> progressive be >> passive be >> Lexical verb.^[30] Examples:

• "He might have been being used by the CIA as part of their debriefing procedure, but he might just as easily have been part of the Russians' plans to use Oswald in America."^[32] Here, the verb phrase is: might (modal) have (perfect) been (progressive) being (passive) used (lexical).
• The modal expression "be able to" is an exception: "It is best to know that she has (perfect) been (progressive) able to (modal expression) balance (lexical verb) these qualities and quantities with a grace which has not fallen short of greatness ...."^[33]

Tense

Verb phrases can vary with tense, in which case they are called "tensed verb phrases."^[34] Example:

• "They have accomplished a lot this year, but they had accomplished even more last year."

There are many non-tensed forms as well:

1. base form of a lexical verb used as an imperative.^[34] Example: "Halt!"
2. base form of the lexical verb occurring as a subjunctive.^[34] Example: "'If he is a spy,' said Gorgik, 'I would rather he not know who I am."^[35]
3. the infinitive with "to."^[34] Examples:
   1. "Did you see her, chief—did you get a glimpse of her pleasant countenance, or come close enough to her ear, to sing in it the song she loves to hear?'"^[36]
   2. "She got so she could tell big stories herself from listening to the rest. Because she loved to hear it, and the men loved to hear themselves, they would 'woof' and 'boogerboo' around the games to the limit."^[37]
4. the "-ing" form.^[34] Examples:
   1. "Biological diversity is plummeting, mainly due to habitat degradation and loss, pollution, overexploitation, competition from alien species, disease, and changing climates."^[38]
   2. "Then it was swooping downward, and in the next second, a huge metal magpie, with wings outstretched in full flight, was plummeting toward them."^[39]
5. the "-ed" participle.^[34] Examples:
   1. "I also know that the painter has dined twice with the Prince Regent."^[40]
   2. "Which in all probability means that you had dined together," replied Monte Cristo, laughing, "I am glad to see you are more sober than he was."^[41]

The time frame of a non-tensed verb phrase is determined by examining that of the main clause verb.^[34] Examples:

• "From the very beginning, Coltrane was an indefatigable worker at his saxophone spending hours upon hours practicing every day."^[42]
• "By assuming a good position and by practicing every day he will in time acquire a feeling and an appearance of ease before people."^[43]

In the first case, the time frame (past) of "practicing" is determined by "was" in the main clause; in the second, the time frame (present and future) of "practicing" is determined by "will in time," also in the main clause.

Aspect

Verb phrases can also express two aspects: progressive and perfect. Aspect provides additional information on the speaker's perception of time.

Progressive aspect

The progressive aspect consists of the auxiliary be form and the -ing form of the lexical verb.^[44] Examples:

• "Landlord, chambermaid, waiter rush to the door; but just as some distinguished guests are arriving, the curtains close, and the invisible theatrical manager cries out, 'Second syllable!' "^[45]
• "She made her curtsy, and was departing when the wretched young captain sprang up, looked at her, and sank back on the sofa with another wild laugh."^[46]

Properties:

• Progressive aspect may be found in verb phrases containing modals.^[44]
  • "Restless, exciting and witty, he cannot resist a fantastic theory ..., so that one might be meeting Synge, Fielding, and Aldous Huxley, and on the same page."^[47]
• Non-tensed -ing forms, however, do not have the progressive aspect.^[44]
  • "By working every day, he had learned the peculiarities, the weaknesses and strengths, of opposing batters ..."^[48] It cannot be changed to "By being working every day, ...."
• Progressive aspect can be combined with "to"-infinitive forms in a verb phrase.^[44]
  • "He loved to sit by the open window when the wind was east, and seemed to be dreaming of faraway scenes."^[49]

Perfect aspect

The perfect aspect is created by the auxiliary "have" and the "-ed" participle form of the lexical verb.^[44] It refers to a time period that includes the present moment.^[44] Contrast "The flowers didn't bloom this summer" with "The flowers haven't bloomed this summer." The latter sentence suggests that the summer is not over yet.

Properties:

• The perfect aspect can pair with modal verbs.^[44]
  • "You might (modal) have invited (perfect) the Mad Hatter to the tea-party."
• The perfect aspect can be combined with the -ing and the to-infinitive forms.^[44]
  • "Having turned the TV on, he now mindlessly flicked through the channels."
  • "To have run the marathon, she would have needed to be in good shape."

Finally, the two aspects, progressive and perfect, can be combined in a verb phrase: "They've been laughing so hard that their sides hurt."

Voice

The passive voice, which provides information about the roles of different participants in an event, is formed with the auxiliary "be" and the "-ed" participle form of the lexical verb.^[50] Examples:

• (Sentence) "The older critics slammed the play with vituperation inexplicable unless one attributes it to homophobia."^[51]
• (passive voice) "Ever notice how she was (past of "be") slammed (-ed participle) by the critics until the actors started doing it themselves?"^[52]

Properties:

• Modal verbs can occur in passive voice.^[50]
  • "And if they couldn't get a handle on it soon, cities and towns all up and down the Eastern Seaboard could (modal) be slammed (passive) by the biggest storm of the year ...."^[53]
• Passive voice can be combined with non-tensed verbs forms such as "-ing" form and the "to-" infinitive.^[50]
  • "There he was—getting slammed by the critics—and still taking the high road."^[54]
  • "We were about to be slammed by an 80-foot breaking wave."^[55]
• Passive voice can combine with both the progressive and the perfect aspects.^[50]
  • (passive, progressive): "The wind had picked up. The boat was being slammed by the swells, and floundering."^[56]
  • (passive, perfect): "Although, alas, it's not such an exclusive club. I've sent them to everyone who has been slammed by that dreadful woman."^[57]

Mood

A verb phrase can also express mood, which refers to the "factual or non-factual status of events."^[50] There are three moods in English: indicative, imperative, and subjunctive.^[50]

Indicative mood

The indicative is the most common mood in English.^[50] It is a factual mood, and most constructions involving the various choices of person, tense, number, aspect, modality are in the indicative mood.^[50] Examples:

• "She will have a hangover tomorrow morning."
• "The Prime Minister and his cabinet were discussing the matter on that fateful day in 1939."

Imperative mood

The imperative mood is a non-factual mood and is employed for issuing directives:^[50]

• "Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on"^[58]
• "'Your father's urn is on the backseat. Just leave the keys in the cup holder."^[59]

Subjunctive mood

The subjunctive mood is also a non-factual mood which refers to demands, desires, etc.^[50] It uses the base form of the verb without inflections.^[50] It is rare in English and is used after only a handful of words such as "demand," "request," "suggest," "ask," "plead," "pray," "insist," and so forth.^[50] Examples:

• "I demanded that Sheriff Jeanfreau stay. I even wanted worthless and annoying Ugly Henderson to stay."^[60]
• "'I suggest that you not exercise your temper overmuch,' Mayne said, and the French tinge in his voice sounded truly dangerous now." ^[61]

Properties:

• Subjunctives can be used after conditional subordinators.^[50]
  • "I accepted on the condition that I not be given a starring role."^[62]
• Subjunctives can also be used after expressions of necessity.^[50]
  • "Two nuns are asked to paint a room in the convent, and the last instruction of Mother Superior is that they not get even a drop of paint on their habits."^[63]
• The subjunctive form of the verb "be" can occur as the base form "be".^[50]
  • "Whenever a prisoner alleges physical abuse, it is imperative that the prisoner be seen by an officer at the earliest possible opportunity."^[64]
• In its "were" form the subjunctive is used to express a hypothetical situation.^[50]
  • "'Lin said, turning toward Pei, "I'm afraid she's excited at seeing me home again." Pei smiled. "I would be too, if I were she."^[65]

Adjectives

According to Carter and McCarthy, "Adjectives describe properties, qualities, and states attributed to a noun or a pronoun."^[66] As was the case with nouns and verbs, the class of adjectives cannot be identified by the forms of its constituents.^[66] However, adjectives are commonly formed by adding the some suffixes to nouns.^[66] Examples: "-al" ("habitual," "multidimensional," "visceral"), "-ful" ("blissful," "pitiful," "woeful"), "-ic" ("atomic," "gigantic," "pedantic"), "-ish" ("impish," "peckish," "youngish"), "-ous" ("fabulous," "hazardous"). As with nouns and verbs, there are exceptions: "homosexual" can be a noun, "earful" is a noun, "anesthetic" can be a noun, "brandish" is a verb. Adjectives can also be formed from other adjectives through the addition of a suffix or more commonly a prefix:^[66] weakish, implacable, disloyal, irredeemable, unforeseen. A number of adjective are formed by adding "a" as a prefix to a verb: "adrift," "astride," "awry."

Gradability

Adjectives come in two varieties: gradable and non-gradable.^[67] In a gradable adjective, the properties or qualities associated with it, exist along a scale.^[67] In the case of the adjective "hot," for example, we can speak of: not at all hot, ever so slightly hot, only just hot, quite hot, very hot, extremely hot, dangerously hot, and so forth. Consequently, "hot" is a gradable adjective. Gradable adjectives usually have antonyms: hot/cold, hard/soft, smart/dumb, light/heavy.^[67] Some adjectives do not have room for qualification or modification. These are the non-gradable adjectives, such as: pregnant, married, incarcerated, condemned, adolescent (as adjective), dead, and so forth.

In figurative or literary language, a non-gradable adjective can sometimes be treated as gradable, especially in order to emphasize some aspect:

• "When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a man's good wit seconded with a forward child, understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room."^[68]

A non-gradable adjective might have another connotation in which it is gradable. For example, "dead" when applied to sounds can mean dull, or not vibrant. In this meaning, it has been used as a gradable adjective:

• "... the bell seemed to sound more dead than it did when just before it sounded in open air."^[69]

Gradable adjectives can occur in comparative and superlative forms.^[67] For many common adjectives, these are formed by adding "-er" and "-est" to the base form:^[67] cold, colder, coldest; hot, hotter, hottest; dry, drier, driest, and so forth; however, for other adjectives, "more" and "most" are needed to provide the necessary qualification: more apparent, most apparent; more iconic, most iconic; more hazardous, most hazardous. Some gradable adjectives change forms atypically:^[67] good, better, best; bad, worse, worst; little, less, least; some/many, more, most.

Adjective phrases

Forms

An adjective phrase may consist of just one adjective, or a single adjective which has been modified or complemented.^[70]

Adjectives are usually modified by adverb phrases (adverb in boldface; adjective in italics):^[70]

• "... placing himself in a dignified and truly imposing attitude, began to draw from his mouth yard after yard of red tape ..."^[71]
• "Families did certainly come, beguiled by representations of impossibly cheap provisions, though the place was in reality very expensive, for every tradesman was a monopolist at heart."^[72]
• "... of anger frequent but generally silent, ..."^[73]

An adjective phrase can also consist of an adjective followed by a complement, usually a prepositional phrase, or by a "that" clause.^[70] Different adjectives require different patterns of complementation (adjective in italics; complement in bold face):^[70]

• "... during that brief time I was proud of myself, and I grew to love the heave and roll of the Ghost ..."^[74]
• "... her bosom angry at his intrusion, ..."^[75]
• "Dr. Drew is especially keen on good congregational singing."^[76]

Examples of "that" clause in the adjective phrase (adjective in italics; clause in boldface):

• "Was sure that the shrill voice was that of a man—a Frenchman."^[77]
• "The longest day that ever was; so she raves, restless and impatient."^[78]

An adjective phrase can combine pre-modification by an adverb phrase and post-modification by a complement,^[70] as in (adjective in italics; adverb phrase and complement in boldface):

• "Few people were ever more proud of civic honours than the Thane of Fife."^[79]

Attributive and predicative

An adjective phrase is attributive when it modifies a noun or a pronoun (adjective phrase in boldface; noun in italics):^[70]

• "Truly selfish genes do arise, in the sense that they reproduce themselves at a cost to the other genes in the genome."^[80]
• "Luisa Rosado: a woman proud of being a midwife"^[81]

An adjective phrase is predicative when it occurs in the predicate of a sentence (adjective phrase in boldface):^[70]

• "No, no, I didn't really think so," returned Dora; "but I am a little tired, and it made me silly for a moment ..."^[82]
• "She was ill at ease, and looked more than usually stern and forbidding as she entered the Hales' little drawing room."^[83]

Adverbs

Adverbs, according to Carter and McCarthy, are a class of words "which perform a wide range of functions. Adverbs are especially important for indicating time, manner, place, degree, and frequency of an event, action, or process."^[84] They typically modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. Adjectives and adverbs are often derived from the same word.^[84] A majority of adverbs are formed by adding to "-ly" ending to their corresponding adjective form.^[84] Recall the adjectives, "habitual," "pitiful," "impish." We can use them to form the adverbs:

• "habitually": "... shining out of the New England reserve with which Holgrave habitually masked whatever lay near his heart."^[85]
• "pitifully": "The lamb tottered along far behind, near exhaustion, bleating pitifully."^[86]
• "impishly": "Well, and he grinned impishly, "it was one doggone good party while it lasted!"^[87]

Some suffixes that are commonly found in adverbs are "-ward(s)" and "-wise":^[84]

• "homeward": "The plougman homeward plods his weary way."^[88]
• "downward": "In tumbling turning, clustering loops, straight downward falling, ..."^[89]
• "lengthwise": "2 to 3 medium carrots, peeled, halved lengthwise, and cut into 1-inch pieces."^[90]

Some adverbs have the same form as the adjectives:^[84]

• "outside":
  • Adverb: "'You'd best begin, or you'll be sorry—it's raining outside."^[91]
  • Adjective: "It would be possible to winter the colonies in the barn if each colony is provided with a separate outside entrance; ..."^[92]
• "straight"
  • Adverb: "Five cigars, very dry, smoked straight except where wrapper loosened, as it did in two cases."^[93]
  • Adjective: "Numbering among the ranks of the "young and evil" in this text are ... straight women who fall in love with gay men, ..."^[94]

Some adverbs are not related to adjectives:^[84]

• "quite": "Mr. Bingley was obliged to be in town the following day, and ... Mrs. Bennet was quite disconcerted."^[95]
• "too": "... like a child that, having devoured its plumcake too hastily, sits sucking its fingers, ...."^[96]
• "so": "... oh! ... would she heave one little sigh to see a bright young life so rudely blighted, ...?"^[97]

Some adverbs inflect for comparative and superlative forms:^[84]

• "soon"
  • "O error, soon conceived, Thou never comest unto a happy birth, ..."^[98]
  • "Nerissa: 'superfluity comes sooner by white hairs, but competency lives longer."^[99]
  • "'Least said, soonest mended!' "^[100]
• "well"
  • "Valrosa well deserved its name, for in that climate of perpetual summer roses blossomed everywhere."^[101]
  • "'I'm afraid your appearance in the Phycological Quarterly was better deserved,' said Mrs. Arkwright, without removing her eyes from the microscope ..."^[102]
  • "Who among the typical Victorians best deserved his hate?"^[103]

Adverb phrases

Forms

An adverb phrase is a phrase that collectively acts as an adverb within a sentence; in other words, it modifies a verb (or verb phrase), an adjective (or adjective phrase), or another adverb.^[104] The head of an adverb phrase (roman boldface), which is an adverb, may be modified by another adverb (italics boldface) or followed by a complement (italics boldface):^[104]

• "Yet all too suddenly Rosy popped back into the conversation, ...."^[105]
• "Oddly enough, that very shudder did the business."^[106]
• "The Stoics said, perhaps shockingly for us, that a father ceases to be a father when his child dies."^[107]

An adverb phrase can be part of the complement of the verb "be." It then usually indicates location (adverbe phrase in boldface; form of "be" in italics):^[104]

• "'... it is underneath the pink slip that I wore on Wednesday with my Mechlin.'"^[108]
• "... north-by-northeast was Rich Mountain, ..."^[109]

Adverb phrases are frequently modifiers of verbs:^[104]

• "They plow through a heavy fog, and Enrique sleeps soundly—too soundly."^[110]
• "Sleepily, very sleepily, you stagger to your feet and collapse into the nearest chair."^[111]

Adverb phrases are also frequently modifiers of adjectives and other adverbs (modifier in boldface; modified in italics):^[104]

• (adjectives) "Then to the swish of waters as the sailors sluice the decks all around and under you, you fall into a really deep sleep."^[112]
• (adverbs) "'My grandma's kinda deaf and she sleeps like really heavily."^[113]

Adverb phrases can also be modifiers of noun phrases (or pronoun phrases) and prepositional phrases (adverb phrases in boldface; modified phrases in italics):^[104]

• (noun phrase): "She stayed out in the middle of the wild sea, and told them that was quite the loveliest place, you could see for many miles all round you, ...."^[114]
• (pronoun phrase): "... the typical structure of glioma is that of spherical and cylindrical lobules, almost each and everyone of which has a centrally located blood vessel."^[115]
• (prepositional phrase): "About halfway through the movie, I decided to ..."^[116]

Adverb phrases also modify determiners (modifier in boldface; modified in italics):^[104]

• "The devil knows best what he said, but at least she became his tool and was in the habit of seeing him nearly every evening."^[117]
• "Nearly if not quite all civilized peoples and ourselves above almost all others, are heavily burdened with the interest upon their public debt."^[118]

Functions

According to Carter and McCarthy, "As well as giving information on the time, place, manner and degree of an action, event, or process, adverb phrases can also have a commenting function, indicating the attitude and point of view of the speaker or writer towards a whole sentence or utterance."^[119] Examples:

• "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."^[120]
• "Astonishingly, she'd shelled every nut, leaving me only the inner skin to remove."^[121]

Adverb phrases also indicate the relation between two clauses in a sentence.^[119] Such adverbs are usually called "linking adverbs." Example:

• "... they concluded from the similarities of their bodies, that mine must contain at least 1724 of theirs, and consequently would require as much food as was necessary to support that number of Lilliputians."^[122]

Prepositions

Prepositions relate two events in time or two people or things in space.^[119] They form a closed class.^[119] They also represent abstract relations between two entities:^[119] Examples:

1. ("after":) "We came home from Mr. Boythorn's after six pleasant weeks."^[123]
2. ("after":) "The body of a little wizened Gond lay with its feet in the ashes, and Bagheera looked inquiringly at Mowgli. "That was done with a bamboo," said the boy, after one glance.^[124]
3. ("to":) "I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life, ..."^[125]
4. ("between" and "through":) "Between two golden tufts of summer grass, I see the world through hot air as through glass, ..."^[126]
5. ("during":) "During these years at Florence, Leonardo's history is the history of his art; he himself is lost in the bright cloud of it."^[127]
6. ("of":) "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrances of things past."^[128]

Prepositions are accompanied by prepositional complements;^[129] these are usually noun phrases.^[129] In the above examples, the prepositional complements are:

1. preposition: "after"; prepositional complement: "six pleasant weeks"
2. preposition: "after"; prepositional complement: "one glance"
3. preposition: "to"; prepositional complement: "the seas"; preposition: "to"; prepositional complement: "the vagrant gypsy life";
4. preposition: "Between"; prepositional complement: "two golden tufts of summer grass,"; preposition: "through"; prepositional complement: "hot air"; preposition: "as through"; prepositional complement: "glass."
5. preposition: "during"; prepositional complement: "these years at Florence."
6. preposition: "of"; prepositional complement: "sweet silent thought"; preposition: "of"; prepositional complement: "things past."

Prepositional phrases

A prepositional phrase is formed when a preposition combines with its complement.^[130]. In the above examples, the prepositional phrases are:

1. prepositional phrase: "after six pleasant weeks"
2. prepositional phrase: "after one glance"
3. prepositional phrases: "to the seas" and "to the vagrant gypsy life"
4. prepositional phrases: "Between two golden tufts of summer grass," "through hot air" and "as through glass."
5. prepositional phrase: "During these years at Florence."
6. prepositional phrases "of sweet silent thought" and "of things past."

Conjunctions

According to Carter and McCarthy, "Conjunctions express a variety of logical relations between phrases, clauses and sentences."^[131] There are two kinds of conjunctions: coordinating conjunctions and subordinating conjunctions.^[131]

Coordinating

Coordinating conjunctions link "elements of equal grammatical status."^[131] The elements in questions may vary from a prefix to an entire sentence.^[131] Examples:

• (prefixes): "The doctor must provide facilities for pre- and post test conselling and have his own strict procedures for the storing of that confidential information."^[132]
• (words): "'No, I'll never love anybody but you, Tom, and I'll never marry anybody but you--and you ain't to ever marry anybody but me, either."^[133]
• (phrases): "Can storied urn or animated bust back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?"^[134]
• (subordinate clauses): "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.^[135]
• (independent clauses): "Well, I think you're here, plain enough, but I think you're a tangle-headed old fool, Jim."^[136]
• (sentences): "He said we were neither of us much to look at and we were as sour as we looked. But I don't feel as sour as I used to before I knew robin and Dickon."^[137]

A correlative conjunction is a pair of constituent elements, each of which is associated with the grammatical unit to be coordinated.^[131] The common correlatives in English are:

• "either ... or":
  • "The clergyman stayed to exchange a few sentences, either of admonition or reproof, with his haughty parishioner ...."^[138]
  • "...; for I could not divest myself of a misgiving that something might happen to London in the meanwhile, and that, when I got there, it would be either greatly deteriorated or clean gone."^[139]
• "neither ... nor":
  • "Buck made no effort. He lay quietly where he had fallen. The lash bit into him again and again, but he neither whined nor struggled."^[140]
  • "For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth, action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech, to stir men's blood: I only speak right on; ..."^[141]
• "both ... and"
  • "There was no mistaking her sincerity—it breathed in every tone of her voice. Both Marilla and Mrs. Lynde recognized its unmistakable ring."^[142]
  • "There messages have both ethical and pragmatic overtones, urging women to recognize that even if they do suffer from physical and social disadvantages, their lives are far from being determined by their biology."^[143]
• "Not only ... but also"
  • "The director of A Doll's House, the brilliant Zhang Min, ..., was impressed with Lin not only professionally but also personally."^[144]
  • "... she attempted to persuade her husband to give up his affair. Not only did he refuse, but he also told her he loved them both ...."^[145]

Subordinating conjunctions

Subordinating conjunction relate only clauses to one another. They make the clause associated with them into a subordinate clause.^[146] Some common subordinating conjunctions in English are: (of time) after, before, since, until, when, while; (cause and effect): because, since, now that, as, in order that, so; (opposition): although, though, even though, whereas, while; (condition): if, unless, only if, whether or not, whether or no, even if, in case (that), and so forth.^[146] Examples:

• (time: "before"): "Perhaps Homo erectus had already died out before Homo sapiens arrived.^[147]
• (cause and effect: "in order that"): "In order that feelings, representations, ideas and the like should attain a certain degree of memorability, it is important that they should not remain isolated ..."^[148]
• (opposition: "although"): "Ultimately there were seven more sessions, in which, although she remained talkative, she increasingly clearly conveyed a sense that she did not wish to come any more."^[149]
• (condition: "even if"): "Even if Sethe could deal with the return of the spirit, Stamp didn't believe her daughter could."^[150]

Sentence and clause patterns

Verb complementation, Clause types, Clause combination, Adjuncts, Information packaging

History of English grammar writing

The first English grammar, Pamphlet for Grammar by William Bullokar , written with the ostensible goal of demonstrating that English was just as rule-bound as Latin , was published in 1586. Bullokar’s grammar was faithfully modeled on William Lily ’s Latin grammar, Rudimenta Grammatices (1534), which was being used in schools in England at that time, having been “prescribed” for them in 1542 by Henry VIII . Although Bullokar wrote his grammar in English and used a “reformed spelling system” of his own invention, many English grammars, for much of the century after Bullokar’s effort, were written in Latin, especially by authors who were aiming to be scholarly. Christopher Cooper’s Grammatica Linguæ Anglicanæ (1685) was the last English grammar written in Latin.

The yoke of Latin grammar writing bore down oppressively on much of the early history of English grammars: any attempt by one author to assert an independent grammatical rule for English was quickly followed by equal avowals by others of truth of the corresponding Latin-based equivalent. Even as late as the early 19th century, Lindley Murray , the author of one of the most widely used grammars of the day, was having to cite “grammatical authorities” to bolster the claim that grammatical cases in English are different from those in Ancient Greek or Latin.