A Grammar for Reading and Writing

You might think that you read the previous sentence word by word: As with speech, we find meaning by grouping words into larger units.. We find meaning by finding ways to break the sent

A Grammar for Reading and Writing

(adapted from http://www.critical-reading.com/grammar_reading_writing.htm)

We do not read words, one by one Meaning is contained not so much in

individual words as in collections of words conveying broader or more specific

ideas

Readers thus make sense of a sentence by breaking it into meaningful chunksand examining their interrelationships Skillful writers focus not so much onindividual words, as on creating and rephrasing larger phrases and clauses

The topics covered here describe the "meaningful chunks" of English sentencestructure In so doing they examine key grammatical principles underlyingeffective reading and writing

Speaking Constructions, Not Words

When discussing speech, we say we know something when we can repeat it "wordfor word." Yet, when we speak, we do not really speak "one word at a time." Webreak the flow of words into chunks And we do not do this randomly, simply to

take a breath now and then We insert pauses to break the flow into meaningful

chunks We do not say

We say:

I left my raincoat on the chair

When we break a sentence into portions, whether by pauses or intonation, we areactually doing grammatical analysis We break the sentence into chunks tofacilitate understanding

Reading and Writing Constructions, Not Words

Words appear on a page one word after another Yet readers do not read word byword, one word at a time As with speech, we find meaning by grouping wordsinto larger units

You might think that you read the previous sentence word by word:

As with speech, we find meaning by grouping words into larger units

Yet meaning becomes apparent only when you see the line somewhat as:

As with speech, we find meaning

by grouping words into larger units

It makes little difference whether we call these units chunks or use more technical terminology (such as phrases and clauses , or the more general term

constructions ), the point is the same: We read chunks, not individual words

The observations above suggest a test: Listen to someone read a passage aloud.You can gauge their understanding by how easily they group words intomeaningful chunks as they read

Ambiguity

The mental process involved in finding meaning in a string of words is mostapparent when various alternative readings make sense that is, in situations thatare ambiguous

She did not marry him because she loved him

Are they married? It depends on how you read the sentence:

She did not marry him because she loved him

They are not married

She did not marry him because she loved him

She married him for other reasons

We find meaning by deciding on a meaningful way to analyze the sentence In sodoing we often attempt to recreate the natural pauses and emphasis that mightindicate structure were the words spoken

Try another one

The drunk driver hit her head on Wednesday

Who was hit? How? Do we know the gender of the driver? Do we know the nature

of the accident?

In an effort to make sense of the sentence, we analyze it various ways

We find meaning by finding ways to break the sentence into meaningful chunks

In the first, the driver's own head is injured on a specific day The driver isfemale

In the second instance, the driver hit a female in a head on collision

In the third, and more improbable, alternative a drunk driver somehow hit afemale's head

Maybe she was leaning over into traffic! Should we come upon such a sentencewithin a text, we would look to the context to decide which reading is appropriate

Structure and Meaning

Finally, consider the following three sentences:

1 The boy ate the apple in the pie

2 The boy ate the apple in the summer

3 The boy ate the apple in a hurry

At first glance, the three sentences seem to have the same structure

1 The boy ate the apple in the pie

2 The boy ate the apple in the summer

3 The boy ate the apple in a hurry

As we try to find meaning in the sentences, however, we discover that theirstructure is different:

1 The boy ate the apple in the pie

2 The boy ate the apple in the summer

3 The boy ate the apple in a hurry

how we break a sentence up

Punctuation often helps in this effort, but punctuation marks only certainboundaries There is the story of the English teacher who wrote the followingwords on the board and asked the students to punctuate the sentence:

Woman without her man is nothing

Students came away with different meanings, depending on how they groupedthe words (Reach an understanding of the sentence yourself, then see thefootnote for the results.) (1)

Slots, Constructions, and Meaning

Once we recognize that we actually read chunks, we might then ask:

· How do we recognize chunks? What do they look like?

And that leads to two other questions:

· Where in a sentence do these chunks normally fall, and

· What meaning can we attach to a particular chunks that is, to aparticular grammatical construction occurring in a particular position in

a sentence?

Complete Reference: The Noun Phrase looks at the most common construction inEnglish sentences Other sections identify particular positions or slots within a

sentence and the meaning attached to the various constructions appearing inthose positions

(1) Some read the words as:

Woman, without her man, is nothing

Others read the same words as:

Woman! Without her, man is nothing

We find, to a great extent, what we want to find!

Complete Reference: The Noun Phrase Full References

The discussion of the choice of language noted that a single concept is oftensignaled by a variety of words, each word possessing slightly differentconnotations We can indicate that people are less than content by saying they

are angry , irate , incensed , perturbed , upset , furious , or mad The broader our

vocabulary, the greater our options and the more precisely we can convey ourmeaning

And yet no matter how wide our vocabulary may be, a single word is ofteninsufficient A single word, by itself, can appear somewhat vague, no matter howspecific that word might seem The term `dog’ may be specific compared to

`mammal,’ but it is general compared to `collie.’ And `collie’ is general compared

to `Lassie.’ Then again, many different dogs played Lassie!

Suppose you want to indicate a female person across the room If you don’t knowher name, what do you say?

That girl

If there were more than one, this alone would be too general It lacks specificity

The girl in the blue Hawaiian shirt

x The taller of the two cheerleaders by the water cooler

When a single term will not supply the reference we need, we add terms to focus

or limit a more general term Instead of referring to drugs in a discussion, we might refer to hallucinogenic drugs We might distinguish between hard drugs and

prescription drugs In so doing we modify the notion of a drug to describe the

specific one, or ones, we have in mind (Then again, at times we are forced touse many words when we cannot recall the one that will really do, as when we

refer to that funny device doctors pump up on your arm to measure blood

pressure instead of a sphygmomanometer )

This section examines how we construct full and specific references using nounphrases An ability to recognize complete noun phrases is essential to readingideas rather than words A knowledge of the various possibilities for constructingextended noun pharses is essential for crafting precide and specific references

Nouns

To begin our discussion, we must first establish the notion of a noun

English teachers commonly identify nouns by their content They describenouns as words that "identify people, places, or things," as well as feelings or

ideas—words like salesman , farm , balcony , bicycle , and trust If you can usually put the word a or the before a word, it’s a noun If you can make the

word plural or singular, it's a noun But don't worry all that is needed at themoment is a sense of what a noun might be

white house

*

large man

*

Modification is a somewhat technical term in linguistics It does not mean to

change something, as when we "modify" a car or dress To modify means to limit,restrict, characterize, or otherwise focus meaning We use this meaningthroughout the discussion here

Modifiers before the noun are called pre-modifiers All of the pre-modifiers that are present and the

noun together form a noun phrase

NOUN PHRASE pre-modifiers noun

*

By contrast, languages such as Spanish and French place modifiers after the noun

casa blanca white house

*

homme grand big man

*

The most common pre-modifiers are adjectives, such as red , long , hot Other

types of words often play this same role Not only articles

the water

*

but also verbs

running water

* and possessive pronouns

her thoughts

* Premodifiers limit the reference in a wide variety of ways

Location: kitchen, westerly Source or Origin: Canadian

Smell: acrid, scented

Material: metal, oak

Size: large, 5-inch

Weight: heavy

A number of pre-modifiers must appear first if they appear at all

Designation: this, that, those, these

Ownership/Possessive: my, our, your, its, their, Mary’s

These words typically signal the beginning of a noun phrase

Some noun phrases are short:

the table

® * Some are long:

the second shiny red Swedish touring sedan

on the choice of language:

The stock market’s summer swoon turned into a dramatic rout Monday as the Dow Jones industrial average plunged

The stock market’s summer swoon turned into a dramatic rout

the history book

the American history book

the illustrated American history book

the recent illustrated American history book

the recent controversial illustrated American history book

the recent controversial illustrated leather bound American history book

Noun Post-Modifiers

We were all taught about pre -modifiers: adjectives appearing before a noun in school Teachers rarely speak as much about adding words after the initial

reference Just as we find pre -modifiers, we also find post -modifiers—

modifiers coming after a noun

The most common post-modifier is prepositional phrases:

the book on the table

*

civil conflict in Africa

*

the Senate of the United States

* Post-modifiers can be short

a dream

*

or long, as in Martin Luther King Jr.’s reference to

a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former

We do not get lost in the flow of words, but recognize structure At the point that

we recognize structure within the sentence, we recognize meaning (Notice alsothat post-modifiers often include clauses which themselves include completesentences, as in the last example above.)

Post-modifiers commonly answer the traditional news reporting questions of who , what , where , when , how , or why Noun post-modifiers commonly take

the following forms:

prepositional phrase the dog in the store

wh - clauses the house where I was born

*

that/which clauses the thought that I had yesterday

*

If you see a preposition, wh - word ( which, who, when where ), -ing verb form, or that or which after

a noun, you can suspect a post-modifier and the completion of a noun phrase

The noun together with all pre- and post-modifiers constitutes a single unit, a noun phrase that indicates the complete reference Any agreement in terms of singular/plural is with the noun at the center

The boys on top of the house are

* Here the noun at the center of the noun phrase is plural, so a plural form of the

verb is called for (not a singular form to agree with the singular house)

The Pronoun Test

In school, we were taught that pronouns replaced nouns Not so Pronouns replace complete noun phrases Pronoun replacement thus offers a test of a

complete noun phrase Consider:

The boy ate the apple in the pie

What did he eat?

The boy ate the apple in the pie

*

Want proof? Introduce the pronoun `it’ into the sentence If a pronoun trulyreplaces a noun, we’d get

*The boy ate the it in the pie

No native speaker would say that! They’d say

The pronoun replaces the complete noun phrase, the apple in the pie

Boxes Within Boxes: Testing for a Complete Noun Phrase

The goal of reading, we noted above, is not to recognize grammatical features,but to find meaning The goal is not to break a sentence or part of a sentenceinto as small pieces as possible, but to break it into chunks in such a way thatfosters the discovery of meaning

Consider one of the examples above of a prepositional phrase as a post-modifier:

the book on the table

Book is a noun at the center of the noun phrase But table is also a noun If

we analyze the noun phrase completely, on all levels, we find:

the book on the table

The Senate of the United States is composed of two legislators from each State

Question: Who is in the Senate?

a) two legislators

b) two legislators from each State?

The answer is b) The full Senate consists of two from each state (100 people),not simply two! We read the sentence as

The Senate of the United States is composed of

two legislators from each State

*

If we read the sentence as

The Senate of the United States

is composed of two legislators

from each State

we miss the meaning

Earlier we noted that pre -modifiers in noun phrase can be expanded to

significant length For the most part, we increased the length of the pre-modifier

by adding additional adjectives, a word or two at a time Noun phrase post

-modifiers can be expanded to much greater lengths We can add long phraseswhich themselves contain complete sentences

the park where I hit a home run when I was in the ninth grade

*

The sentence within the post-modifier is printed in boldface

The following sentence indicates something was lost What was lost?

He lost the book by Mark Twain about the Mississippi that he took out of the library on Sunday before the game so that he could study during half time when his brother was getting popcorn

The answer is the complete phrase

……… the book by Mark Twain about the Mississippi that he took out of the library on Sunday before the game so that he could study during half time when his brother was getting popcorn

The base term book is modified as to author (Mark Twain), topic (about the

Mississippi), as well as intent or purpose (that he took out of the library onSunday before the game so that he could study during half time when his brotherwas getting popcorn.) We assume that he has another book by Twain about theMississippi that he did not lose Want proof? What would be replaced by `it’?

The full reference of a noun phrase is often `conveniently’ ignored in movie

advertisements Janet Maslin, movie critic for The New York Times , complained

when an advertisement for the video tape of John Grisham’s "The Rainmaker"quoted her as describing the movie as director Francis Ford Coppola’s `best andsharpest film,’ when, in fact, her review stated:

John Grisham’s "The Rainmaker" is Mr Coppola’s best and sharpest film inyears (1)

The original quotation does not refer to the `best and sharpest film’ of Coppola’scareer, but to his `best and sharpest film in years.’

Noun Phrases: The Dominant Construction

Finally, the degree to which noun phrases are the dominant construction withintexts can be seen in the opening paragraph of the Text for Discussion: Annotation

- Needle Exchange Programs and the Law - Time for a Change The completenoun phrases appear within square brackets and appear in red

(1) In [ his social history of venereal disease ], [ No Magic Bullet ], [ Allan M

prevention effort that recognized that many young American men would succumb

failed [ More than 383,000 soldiers ]were diagnosed with[ venereal

Implications For Reading and Writing

The above discussion introduces a number of concepts crucial to effective readingand writing

 We do not read texts word by word, but chunk by chunk We must readeach grammatical construction as a single unit Deciphering sentencesinvolves isolating phrases within a sentence and recognizing where longphrases begin and end

 To write well is not to string words together, but to string together largerphrases, to create full references that carefully distinguish one idea fromanother, going beyond talking in vague generalities We can increase theclarity and sophistication of our thought by using extended phrasesinstead of single words

Sophisticated thought is qualified thought Intelligent discussion goes beyondeither/or or black-or-white views of the world to recognize nuances anddistinctions

Remarks can be

 extended (made broader or more general) ,

 qualified (restricted in some way), or

 limited (made more specific or less encompassing)

We don’t really make sentences longer by adding at the end so much asexpanding each chunk

Good writers carefully distinguish between all, most, many , some, few, and one.

They specify the specific time, condition, or circumstances an assertion is true.Some claims are made for certain, some "in all probability" or "within a specificmargin of error," some for given conditions

Good writers carefully distinguish between all, most, many, some, few, and one.

They specify the specific time, condition, or circumstances an assertion is true

Some claims are made for certain, some "in all probability" or "within a specificmargin of error," some for given conditions

When drawing careful distinctions, authors are not being wishy-washy or nitpicking They are simply being precise They are saying exactly what they want tosay or feel secure in saying based on the available evidence Weak writers canachieve an immediate gain in the level of thought of their writing by takingadvantages of the opportunities for adding pre- and post-modifiers

For writers, this model is a reminder of the opportunity to extend, limit, orotherwise shape a specific idea You can greatly increase the sophistication anddepth of thought of your work by taking advantage of these pre- and post-modifier "slots" Having written a statement, you might go back in editing to seehow you can further shape your thoughts by making use of these slots

The Constitution is the nation’s charter, and lawmakers should resist the temptation to push for amendments every time an election year rolls around

Notice how much richer the next sentence is (additional modifiers in bold face)

The Constitution of the United States is the nation’s bedrock charter, and devoted lawmakers sworn to uphold it should resist the dangerous temptation to push for pandering amendments every time an

election year rolls around

(1) Janet Maslin, `When Phrases That Flatter Are Misused,’ The New YorkTimes ,

Arts & Leisure section, August 23, 1998, p 9

Sentence and Predicate Modifiers

At times when reading, we come away with little, if any, understanding We see the trees, but not the forest

We may miss the meaning for a number of reasons We may not know the

meaning of certain words or the concepts to which they refer Even when we understand the words, we may come away with little understanding because the writing itself is particularly complex In this latter instance, it is often helpful to apply grammatical analysis, to consciously attempt to break the sentence into meaningful units

A Model Of English Sentence Structure

All English sentences follow the same basic formula All speakers of the language are familiar with that formula, and yet this model is rarely if ever taught (1) The discussion here lays that formula out

The discussion of noun phrases demonstrated the need to recognize grammatical constructions as complete units There we were concerned with a single

grammatical construction irrespective of where it appeared within a sentence

This section looks more broadly at the sentence as a whole It identifies various positions or slots within the sentence and discusses how constructions appearing within these slots shape the meaning of the sentence as a whole In so doing, thediscussion shows you how to make sense of complex sentences when you come across them in your reading, and how to construct them in your own writing

Simple, Compound, and Complex Sentences

Simple sentences contain a subject and predicate a topic and a statement about that topic More complicated sentences can be formed by stringing elements of a

simple sentences together to make compound sentences or by adding other elements to make a complex sentence These pages focuss on three ways of

expanding a simple sentence into a complex sentence:

Review: Sentence and Predicate Modifiers

We read all sentences with a dual awareness of both meaning and structure We break each sentence into meaningful chunks and figure out their grammatical relationships:

Recall our three model sentences:

1 The boy ate the apple in the pie

2 The boy ate the apple in the summer

3 The boy ate the apple in a hurry

We can now see how we analyze these sentences differently to find meaning Using the notation above, we now see the following structures:

1 The boy ate the apple in the pie

*

2 The boy ate the apple [ in the summer

To understand each sentence, we must analyze the relationship of its parts That process is made easier with a knowledge of and a feeling for the various possible relationships: here noun modifiers, sentence modifiers, and predicate modifiers Remember the sentence

He did not marry her because he loved her

The two meanings stem from two equally legitimate analyses In the analysis

He did not marry her [ because he loved her

they are not married The phrase

because he loved her

is in the end sentence modifier slot that modifies the remainder of the sentence

We can test this by shifting the final construction from the end to the front slot

He did not marry her because he loved her Because he loved her , he did not marry her

Note the addition here of the comma when the front slot is filled

In the analysis

He did not marry her because he loved her

they still might be married for other reasons The phrase

because he loved her

is determined to be in the predicate modifier slot, indicating a reason for

Lung Cancer in Women Mushrooms

We can now read this as a reference to a certain disease

Lung Cancer in Women Mushrooms

*

Female mushrooms have cancer! Or as an event

Lung Cancer in Women Mushrooms

*

Cancer in women is increasing—obviously the intended meaning!

Analyze the following yourself

· Reagan Wins on Budget, But More Lies Ahead

· Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant

· Two Sisters Reunited after 18 Years in Checkout Counter

· Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim

· Hospitals are Sued by 7 Foot Doctors

· Killer Sentenced to Die for Second Time in 10 Years

Other examples can be found in "The Lower case" section of the Columbia

Journalism Review : (5) :

Thai Hospital Admits Starving Refugee Babies

The Cambodia Daily , 2/26/98

Salad still good after 50 years

Tribune-Star (Terra Haute, Ind.) 3/11/98

Transportation department to hold public meetings on I-49

The Times (Shreveport, La.) 3/19/98

MEDIA: Some Fear Coverage Reflects Judgment

Los Angeles Times 1/29/98

Can you distinguish between ambiguity of word meaning and grammatical

ambiguity?

Implications For Reading

What does the above analysis do for us? To find meaning in a sentence, we must break it into meaningful parts, and we must understand how those parts arerelated to each other

When we group words into larger constructions, we accomplish two goals First

we reduce the complexity of the sentence as a whole into smaller, more

manageable parts In so doing, we group words to identify complete references The meaning we come away with depends on how we break up (analyze) a sentence

The best strategy is to initially break the sentence into a few parts Locate a basicsimple sentence and identify how any remaining constructions are related to that basic simple sentence The slot model offers a template for that effort

Earlier we recognized King's full dream Within the construction defining that dream we can now recognize a time, a location, and an event:

one day

on the red hills of Georgia

the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able

to sit down together at a table of brotherhood

We find a complex sentence consisting of two front sentence modifiers followed

by a simple sentence with a predicate modifier at the end

one day ] on the red hills of Georgia ] the sons of former slaves and the sons offormer slaveowners will be able to sit down together { at a table of brotherhood.Finally, consider the following sentence:

When Ulysses S Grant and Robert E Lee met in the parlor of a modest house at Appomattox Court House, Virginia to work out the terms for the surrender of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, a great chapter in American life came to a close and a greater chapter began

At first, this appears to be a long and complex sentence When we draw on the notions reviewed above, however, we see that its structure is really simple We have a front sentence modifier

When Ulysses S Grant and Robert E Lee met in the parlor of a modest house at Appomattox Court House, Virginia to work out the terms for the surrender of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, ]

a great chapter in American life came to a close and a greater chapter began

followed by a series of simple sentences

a great chapter in American life came to a close and

a great new chapter began

To test this analysis, try shifting the modifier:

A great chapter in American life came to a close, and

a great new chapter began

[ when Ulysses S Grant and Robert E Lee met in the parlor of a modest house at Appomattox Court House, Virginia to work out the terms for the surrender of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia

The large construction passes the test for a sentence modifier While that large construction may be the most interesting piece of the sentence, it is not the most crucial to the meaning The main idea of the sentence is about great chapter(s) beginning and ending The large construction does not identify or describe those chapters; it only says when the shift came

Implications For Writing

The "slot" model of sentences developed above offers a template into which to fit constructions in the effort to make sense of sentences The same model offers writers opportunities to qualifying references and ideas in terms of place, quality, time, purpose, type, extent, or conditions Writing that does not make use of the sentence modifier, predicate modifier, and insert slots can be decidedly childlike in expression and simplistic in thought

(1) The discussion is based on Robert L Allen, English Grammars and English

Grammar , Scribner's, Scribner's, 1972 Out of print

(2) Letter to Editor, The New York Times , May 8, 1998 (Printed May 12, 1998),

by Charlton Heston, NRA First Vice-President

(3) William H Dunlop, Letter to the Editor, The New York Times , Austin edition,

June 10, 1998, p A28

(4) Pete Hamill, Twenty Seven Words-The Bloody Problem of the Second

Amendment , (Mightywords, 2000), www.mightywords.com, p 4

(5) The examples from March/April and May/June 1998 issues

SENTENCE MODIFIER ] subject + predicate [ SENTENCE MODIFIER

We shall mark front and end sentence modifiers with the notion

front modifier ] [ end modifier Recall the second model sentence from the set of three at the introduction to this section:

2 The boy ate the apple [ in the summer

Here the final phrase, in the summer , modifiers the earlier sentence as a whole It indicates when the

boy at the apple

What proof do we have that this last phrase really modifiers the remainder of the sentence as a whole?

The proof lies in the fact that

 the main portion can stand alone as a simple sentence, and

The boy ate the apple

 the modifier portion of the sentence can be shifted between the front and back without essentially changing the meaning

(Emphasis may change slightly, and there is a stylistic convention of putting short sentence modifiers first.)