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.