The purpose of the book

Б. А. ИЛЬИШ

Строй

Современного английского

Языка

Учебник по курсу теоретической грамматики для студентов педагогических институтов

На английском языке) ИЗДАНИЕ ВТОРОЕ

ИЗДАТЕЛЬСТВО „ПРОСВЕЩЕНИЕ"

ЛЕНИНГРАДСКОЕ ОТДЕЛЕНИЕ

ЛЕНИНГРАД 1971

Сканирование, распознавание, вычитка:
Аркадий Куракин, г. Николаев, июль 2004 г.

{ark # mksat. net}

Только для использования с некоммерческой целью студентами и преподавателями в учебном процессе.

Орфография из ам. переведена в британскую.

Исправлено ок. 15 опечаток. В частности: prepositoin (178), adressed (183) (2), stylistical (232), conjunctious (267), prepositoinal (283), Dickens’s (302), froom (310) interpretaiton (328), actoin (329), Enlgish (351).

—4 -71

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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

In preparing this edition, care has been taken to bring the text of the book up to date and to introduce the reader to some outstanding problems of modern linguistics. One of these concerns the relations between morphology and syntax, on the one hand, and paradigmatic and syntagmatic phenomena, on the other. Recent discussion of this problem has also immediate connection with the treatment of the notion of "sentence". Much attention has accordingly been given to this set of problems in the appropriate places.

Some corrections have also been made in various parts of the book.

Its main purpose remains unchanged. It is meant to encourage the students to think on the essential problems of English language structure and to form their own views of the relevant questions.

B. Ilyish

September 1970

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

This book is intended as a textbook for the theoretical course on English grammar forming part of the curriculum in our Universities and Teachers' colleges. Its main purpose is to introduce the student to the many linguistic problems connected with grammatical structures and to the modern methods applied in dealing with them. I have endeavoured, as far as was possible, to point out the essence of the problems, and to state the arguments which have been, or may be, put forward in favour of one view or another. This should enable the reader to form a judgement of his own on the question involved and on the respective merits of the various solutions proposed.

It will be found that in many points the views expressed here differ from those laid down in my earlier work on the subject, published in Russian in 1948.¹ I have not thought it necessary or expedient to point out in every case the motives which have brought about these changes. The development of linguistics in the last few decades has been so quick and so manifold that a new insight has been gained into practically all the problems dealt with here, and into many others as well, for that matter. This of course was bound to be reflected in the contents of the book and in its very structure.

I have tried to avoid mentioning too many names of scholars or titles of books, preferring to call the reader's attention to the problems themselves. Some hints about authors have of course been given in the footnotes.

¹ Б. А. Ильиш, Современный английский язык, изд. 2-е, 1948. 1*

4 Preface

A few words may not be out of place here concerning the kind of work students may bo expected to do in their seminar hours. This may include, besides analysis of modem texts from theoretical points of view treated in the book, reports on the same problems, and discussion of views held by various authors. Some of these problems will probably lend themselves more readily than others to such discussion; among them, the following may be suggested: parts of speech in English; the category of case in nouns and pronouns; the stative; aspect; the perfect and the problem of correlation; voice; prepositions and conjunctions; types of sentences; types of predicate; secondary parts of a sentence; asyndetic composite sentences. Of course much will depend in each case on the teacher's own choice and on the particular interests expressed by the students.

My sincere thanks are due to the chair of English grammar of the Lenin Pedagogical Institute, Moscow, and the chair of English philology of Leningrad University, for the trouble they took in reviewing the MS, and also to Mr William Ryan, postgraduate student of Oriel College, Oxford, who went through the MS and suggested many improvements in the wording of the text.

Ilyish

INTRODUCTION

THE PURPOSE OF THE BOOK

The purpose of this book is to present a systematic study of the grammatical structure of Modern English. It presupposes a sufficient knowledge on the part of the reader of the practical rules pertaining both to the morphology and to the syntax of the language. Thus, we are not going to set out here the ways, for example, of forming the plural of English nouns, or those of forming the past tense of English verbs. It will be our task to give an analysis of English grammatical structure in the light of general principles of linguistics. This is going to involve, in a number of cases, consideration of moot points on which differing views have been expressed by different scholars. In some cases the views of scholars appear to be so far apart as to be hardly reconcilable. It will be our task to consider the main arguments put forward to sustain the various views, to weigh each of them, and to find out the most convincing way of solving the particular problem involved.

What the student is meant to acquire as a result of his studies is an insight into the structure of the language and an ability to form his own ideas on this or that question. This would appear to be a necessary accomplishment for a teacher of English (at whatever sort of school he may be teaching), who is apt to find differing, and occasionally contradictory, treatment of the grammatical phenomena he has to mention in his teaching. Such are, for example, the system of parts of speech, the continuous forms of the verb, the asyndetic composite sentences, etc.

In the course of the history of linguistics many different views of language and languages have been put forward. It is not our task to discuss them here. Suffice it to say that the treatment of a language as a system was characteristic of the grammarians of the 17th century (see, for instance, the French "Grammaire générale de Port-Royal", a grammar published in 1660). Though this was not a linguistic work in any modern sense, it was based on the assumption that the state of a language at a given period was a system and could be treated as such. This view of language structure was then abandoned in favour of a purely historical outlook until the. early years of the 20th century, when the Swiss scholar Ferdinand de Saussure (1857—1913) laid the foundations of a new linguistic theory acknowledging the study of a system of a given language as such. ^l De Saussure's views were then developed and modified by various schools of modern linguistic thinking. Part, at least, of his views of language were adopted, with certain reservations, by

¹ P. de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, Geneve, 1922.

6 Introduction

the bulk of Soviet scholars. It is on the basis of this view that a theoretical investigation of the grammatical system of a language at a definite point of its history becomes possible and fruitful.

A peculiarity of the modern trend of linguistics is the desire to arrive at results independent of the view of a particular scholar. There can hardly be any doubt that the ability to arrive at such results would mark a significant advance in linguistics, which has far too long been suffering from conflicts between contradictory views put forward by various authors and disputed by others. As far as can be foreseen at the moment, the area of objective results not to be disputed will gradually increase at the expense of the debated area, which, however, can hardly be expected ever to disappear altogether. In discussing this or that particular problem in this book, we will try to define what can be said to be firmly established and what remains controversial.

A word is necessary here about the limits of grammar as part of a language's structure and the other aspects (or "levels") of language, viz. the phonetic (phonological) and the lexical.

It need hardly be emphasised that a language is a whole consisting of parts closely united. The linguist's task is, accordingly, to point out the demarcation line separating those aspects or levels from one another, on the one hand, and the connections between them, on the other. This is by no means an easy task, as we shall more than once have occasion to observe. Our subject is the grammatical structure of English, and we shall have to delineate the borderlines and connections between grammatical structure, on the one hand, and phonetics (phonology) and the vocabulary, on the other.

LANGUAGE AND SPEECH

The distinction between language and speech, which was first introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure in his book on general linguistics, has since become one of the cornerstones of modern linguistics. Though differences of opinion still persist in the exact delineation of the boundaries between the two spheres, its general idea has been accepted by most scholars.

-Language, then, is the system, phonological, lexical, and grammatical, which lies at the base of all speaking. It is the source which every speaker and writer has to draw upon if he is to be understood by other speakers of the language.

Speech on the other hand, is the manifestation of language, or its use by various speakers and writers of the given language. Thus what we have before us, in oral or in written form, as material for analysis, is always a product of speech, namely something either-pronounced or written by some individual speaker or writer or, occasionally, a group of speakers or writers. There is no other way

Language and Speech 7

for a scholar to get at language than through its manifestations in speech.

As we are here concerned with grammar only, we will not dwell on the problem of a language system in phonology, orthography, and lexicology, but we will concentrate on the system of grammar and of its manifestations in speech, where of course it can never appear isolated from phonology and lexicology.

Thus, in stating that English nouns have a distinction of two numbers, singular and plural, and that there are several ways of expressing the category of plural number in nouns, we are stating facts of language, that is, elements of that system on which a speaker or writer of English has to draw.

Similarly, the statement that in English there are phrases of the pattern "adverb + adjective + noun", is certainly a statement about language, namely, about the syntactical system of English on the phrase level. Thus, in building such concrete phrases as, very fine weather, extremely interesting novel, strikingly inadequate reply, etc., a speaker draws, as it were, on the stock of phrase patterns existing in the language and familiar to its speakers, and he fills the pattern with words, choosing them from the stock of words existing in the language, in accordance with the thought or feeling, etc., that he wants to express. For instance, the concrete phrase, strikingly inadequate reply, is a fact of speech, created by the individual speaker for his own purposes, and founded on a knowledge, (a) of the syntactical pattern in question, and (b) of the words which he arranges according to the pattern.

It may perhaps be said, with some reservations, that the actual sentences pronounced by a speaker, are the result of organising words drawn from the language's word stock, according to a pattern drawn from its grammatical system.

So it appears that the, material which a scholar takes up for investigation is always a fact of speech. Were it not for such facts of speech, whether oral or written, linguistic investigation would not be all possible. It is the scholar's task, then, to analyse the speech facts which are at his disposal, in such a manner as to get through them to the underlying language system, without which they could not have been produced.

NEW METHODS

The last few years have seen a rapid development of various new methods of linguistic investigation, and there is a great variety of views as to their merits.

Briefly, the three main positions in this field may be summarised as follows:

(1) Some scholars think that the new methods now appearing mark the beginnings of linguistics as a science and that everything

8 Introduction

that was done earlier in linguistics belongs to a "prescientific age".

(2) Other scholars are sceptical about the new methods and think that they tend to lead linguistic science away from its proper tasks and to replace it by something incompatible with its essential character.

(3) There is the view that the new methods mark a new period in the development of linguistics, and should be tried out, without implying that everything done in earlier periods should therefore be considered as valueless and "prescientific".

Without going into details about this discussion we will merely. state that the view mentioned last appears to be the most reasonable one and the one likely to prevail in the long run, as has more than once been seen in the history of different branches of learning.

We will therefore keep in our treatment of English grammatical structure many ideas and terms inherited from traditional grammar, such as, for instance, the theory of the parts of speech and parts of the sentence, and at the same time point out what new light is shed on these problems by recently developed methods, and what change the formulation of the very issues should undergo in the light of the new ideas. It will not be too much to say that a considerable number of familiar statements about grammatical facts cannot now be upheld without essential modification, and it would be pointless to ignore this fact. On the other hand, much of what is convincing and useful in the new views has not yet attained a shape which would make it convenient for presentation in a textbook like the present. It will therefore be our task to introduce the reader at least to some of these problems, and to help him prepare for reading the numerous special treatises on these subjects.

What appears to be most essential in the light of new ideas which tend to make linguistics something like an exact science, is a distinction between problems admitting of a definite solution which can be convincingly demonstrated and cannot be denied, and problems admitting of various opinions, rather than of a definite solution. This must not be taken to mean that problems of the second kind should be abandoned: they should be further discussed and their discussion is likely to be fruitful. The point is that an opinion, which can exist side by side with another opinion, should not be presented as a final solution admitting of no alternative. It is especially in the sphere of syntax that problems admitting of various opinions rather than of definite solutions are to be found.

Although in some cases the line between the two sets of problems may be rather hard to draw, the basic difference between them should be always kept in mind. This will help the student to put both the problems themselves and the views of different authors in the proper perspective.

Ore Grammatical Statements 9

In discussing grammatical categories, we shall often have to mention oppositions, that is, pairs of grammatical forms opposed to each other in some way. A simple case in point is the opposition between the singular and the plural number in nouns, with their definite meanings: one as against more than one.

It is often found that of two members of an opposition one has quite a definite meaning, whereas the meaning of the other is less definite, or vague. This is found, for instance, in the opposition between the forms was writing and wrote: the meaning of the form was writing is quite definite, while that of the form wrote is hard even to define. The terms usual for such cases are, "marked" and "unmarked". Thus, the form was writing is the marked, and the form wrote, the unmarked member of the opposition. We shall have more than one occasion to apply these terms.

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