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Formulaic ExpressionsTo express greetings, farewell, thanks, or apologies, we use a wide range of FORMULAIC EXPRESSIONS. These may consist of a single word or of several words acting as a unit. Here are some examples:
Some formulaic expressions express agreement or disagreement with a previous speaker: yes, yeah, no, okay, right, sure INTERJECTIONS generally occur only in spoken English, or in the representation of speech in novels. They include the following: ah, eh, hmm, oh, ouch, phew, shit, tsk, uhm, yuk Interjections express a wide range of emotions, including surprise (oh!), exasperation (shit!), and disgust (yuk!). Formulaic expressions, including interjections, are unvarying in their form, that is, they do not take any inflections. 9.2 Existential there We have seen that the word there is an adverb, in sentences such as: You can't park there Specifically, it is an adverb of place in these examples. However, the word there has another use. As EXISTENTIAL THERE, it often comes at the start of a sentence: There is a fly in my soup Existential there is most commonly followed by a form of the verb be. When it is used in a question, it follows the verb: Is there a problem with your car? The two uses of there can occur in the same sentence: There is a parking space there In this example, the first there is existential there, and the second is an adverb. 9.3 Uses of It In the section on pronouns, we saw that the word it is a third person singular pronoun. However, this word also has other roles which are not related to its pronominal use. We look at some of these other uses here. When we talk about time or the weather, we use sentences such as: What time is it? Here, we cannot identify precisely what it refers to. It has a rather vague reference, and we call this DUMMY IT or PROP IT. Dummy it is also used, equally vaguely, in other expressions: Hold it! It is sometimes used to "anticipate" something which appears later in the same sentence: It's great to see you In the first example, it "anticipates" to see you. We can remove it from the sentence and replace it with to see you: To see you is great Because of its role in this type of sentence, we call this ANTICIPATORY IT. See also: Cleft Sentences Introduces phrases
We have now completed the first level of grammatical analysis, in which we looked at words individually and classified them according to certain criteria. This classification is important because, as we'll see, it forms the basis of the next level of analysis, in which we consider units which may be larger than individual words, but are smaller than sentences. In this section we will be looking at PHRASES. Defining a Phrase When we looked at nouns and pronouns, we said that a pronoun can sometimes replace a noun in a sentence. One of the examples we used was this: [Children] should watch less television ~[They] should watch less television Here it is certainly true that the pronoun they replaces the noun children. But consider: [The children] should watch less television ~[They] should watch less television In this example, they does not replace children. Instead, it replaces the children, which is a unit consisting of a determiner and a noun. We refer to this unit as a NOUN PHRASE (NP), and we define it as any unit in which the central element is a noun. Here is another example: I like [the title of your book] ~I like [it] In this case, the pronoun it replaces not just a noun but a five-word noun phrase, the title of your book. So instead of saying that pronouns can replace nouns, it is more accurate to say that they can replace noun phrases. We refer to the central element in a phrase as the HEAD of the phrase. In the noun phrase the children, the Head is children. In the noun phrase the title of your book, the Head is title. Noun phrases do not have to contain strings of words. In fact, they can contain just one word, such as the word children in children should watch less television. This is also a phrase, though it contains only a Head. At the level of word class, of course, we would call children a plural, common noun. But in a phrase-level analysis, we call children on its own a noun phrase. This is not simply a matter of terminology -- we call it a noun phrase because it can be expanded to form longer strings which are more clearly noun phrases. From now on in the Internet Grammar, we will be using this phrase-level terminology. Furthermore, we will delimit phrases by bracketing them, as we have done in the examples above. Date: 2015-12-17; view: 1046
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