Luận văn English Grammar COLLINS COBUILD COLLINS Birmingham University International Language Database ENGLISH GRAMMAR COLLINS PUBLISHERS THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM COLLINS London and Glasgow Collins ELT Grafton Street London W1X 3LA COBUILD is a trademark of William Collins Sons & Co Ltd ©William Collins Sons & Co Ltd 1990 First published 1990 10 Alt rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of the Publisher ISBN 00 370257 X Paperback ISBN 00 375025 Cased Printed and bound in Great Britain by Richard Clay Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk NOTE Entered words that we have reason to believe constitute trademarks have been designated as such However, neither the presence nor absence of such designation should be lrAfyed as affecting the legal status of any trademark Contents Editorial team 2 Introduction Note on Examples Guide to the Use of the Grammar Glossary of Grammatical Terms Cobuild Grammar Chart 18 Chapter Referring to people and things 19 Nouns 21 Pronouns 38 Determiners 48 Chapter Giving information about people and things 61 Adjectives 62 Possessives 89 Quantifiers 91 Numbers 97 Qualifiers 107 Chapter Making a message 113 Transitivity 113 Complementation 139 Phase 147 Chapter Varying the message 153 Mood 153 Negation 162 Modality 169 Chapter Expressing time 188 Verb tenses 189 Adjuncts of time 197 Chapter Expressing manner and place .213 Adjuncts 213 Manner 216 Place 223 Chapter Reporting what people say or think 235 Chapter Combining messages 254 Subordination 255 Coordination 274 Chapter Making texts 282 Cohesion 282 Ellipsis 290 Chapter 10 The structure of information .293 The Reference Section 317 Index 338 Editorial team Editor-in-Chief Managing Editor Editors Assistant Editors Senior researcher Computer Officer Clerical Staff Consultants John Sinclair Gwyneth Fox Stephen Bullon Ramesh Krishnamurthy Elizabeth Manning John Todd Mona Baker Jane Bradbury Richard Fay Deborah Yuill Rosamund Moon Tim Lane Sue Smith Jane Winn Gottfried Graustein M.A.K Halliday Collins Publishers Annette Capel, Lorna Heaslip, Douglas Williamson Many other people have been involved with the project at both research and editing stages Patrick Hanks, who was the Editorial Director of Cobuild throughout the project, made a valuable contribution both in policy and in detail Dominic Bree, Jane Cullen, and Clare Ramsey worked as researchers in the early stages, and Ron Hardie helped from the beginning until quite late in the editing process David Brazil gave us great help and encouragement during the early editing of the book Without his support, this would have been a more difficult task Helen Liebeck and Christina Rammell were influential in the early stages of editing Michael Hoey and Charles Owen, members of the Department of English, University of Birmingham, and PhD and MA students in the department, in particular Richard Francis, Agnes Molnar, Iria Garcia, Ramiro Restrepo, Christopher Royal-Dawson, and Bob Walter, worked on and read drafts of the text The publishers and editorial team would also like to thank the following people who read and commented on the text John Curtin: Brazil; Henri Bejoint, John Hall, Sue Inkster, and Anne Pradeilles: France; Georgina Pearce and Herman Wekker: Germany; Marcel Lemmens: Holland; Nicholas Brownloes, Tony Buckby, Anthony Harvey, and Georgina Pert: Italy; Roger Hunt, Andy Kennedy, Christopher Pratt, and Tony Sanchez: Spain; Mary Snell-Hornby: Switzerland; Katy Shaw and Tom Stableford: UK; Adriana Bolivar: Venezuela Teachers from many countries participated in workshops where material from the Grammar was presented We are grateful to all of them for taking part in these workshops, especially those organized by the British Council, Singapore, the British Council, Paris, the Britannia School, Rio de Janeiro, the ENPULJ Conference, Natal, Brazil, and the JALT Conference, Okayama, Japan Introduction This grammar is for anyone who is interested in the English language and how it works Many people will come to this book because they are learning English and trying to master the structure of the language As soon as they have enough practical English to master the text, they will find this grammar helpful to them although it has been written primarily for students of advanced level The information the book contains, however, will also engage the attention of a different sort of student—those who make a study of English because they are simply interested in language and languages They include teachers, examiners, syllabus planners and materials writers The grammar has several unique features which will give them very useful information The information in this book is taken from a long and careful study of present-day English Many millions of words from speech and writing have been gathered together in a computer and analyzed, partly by the computer and partly by a team of expert compilers It is the first grammar of its kind, and it is deferent in many respects from other kinds of grammar This grammar attempts to make accurate statements about English, as seen in the huge Birmingham Collection of English Texts The main patterns of English are picked out and described, and the typical words and phrases found in each pattern are listed This is what a grammar ought to do, but only very recently has it been possible For a long time there has been a credibility gap between a grammar and the language that it is supposed to describe Many of the rules seem too abstract to apply to actual examples There is no room to show how the strong structural patterns can be varied and developed to allow users great freedom of expression A Grammar of Functions People who study and use a language are mainly interested in how they can things with the language—how they can make meanings, get attention to their problems and interests, influence their friends and colleagues and create a rich social life for themselves They are only interested in the grammatical structure of the language as a means to getting things done A grammar which puts together the patterns of the language and the things you can with them is called a functional grammar This is a functional grammar: each chapter is built around a major function of language, such as 'concept building', 'making up messages', and 'reporting what someone said' Each of these functions is regularly expressed in English by one particular structure For example, concept building is usually expressed structures built around a noun, called noun groups; messages are very often expressed in clauses; and reports typically involve a pair of clauses, with one of them containing a reporting verb such as 'say', and the other one beginning with 'that' or having quote marks (' ') round it This grammar is based on these important correspondences between structure and function, which are set out in the Cobuild Grammar Chart on the following pages The skeleton of English grammar is seen in this chart However, there are many minor features of English that cannot appear on a simple summary chart The grammar of a language is flexible, and with the passage of time there are changes in meaning and use of grammatical forms For example, although it is true to say that the noun group is the structure we choose for the things we want to talk about, it is not the only one Sometimes we want to talk about an event or an idea that is not easy to express in a noun group Instead we can use a clause as the subject of another clause All I want is a holiday We can also use a clause as the object or complement of another clause That's what we've always longed for By extending the basic grammar occasionally, speakers of English can express themselves more easily and spontaneously The same kind of extension works in the other direction also: noun groups are not only used as subjects, objects and complements They can function as adjuncts of time, for example, among a range of minor uses He phoned back with the information the very next day But there is a major area of English grammar based on prepositions (see Chapter 6), which allows noun groups to be used in all sorts of subsidiary functions in the clause I went to a village school This has been my home for ten years now With a click, the door opened So it can be seen that the structural patterns can have more than one function, and that different structures can have similar functions This may sound confusing, and it can be confusing if the grammar is not carefully organized around the major structures and functions This grammar follows up each major statement (often called 'rule' in other grammars) with a detailed description of the usages surrounding that statement—including 'exceptions' Other ways of achieving the same sort of effect are then presented, with cross-references to the main structural patterns involved Later in the chapter, the various extensions of use of a structure are set out, with cross-references to places where those functions are thoroughly treated These extensions and additions to the functions of a structure are not just random Usually they can be presented as ways of widening the scope of the original function For example, the basic, central function of reporting verbs (Chapter 7) is to introduce what someone has said He said he would be back soon It can easily be extended to include what someone has written: His mother wrote that he had finally arrived home Then it can be widened to include thoughts and feelings; these not need to be expressed in words, but the report structure is very convenient The boys thought he was dead From this we can see the reporting clause as a more general way of introducing another clause The reporting clause becomes a kind of preface, commenting on the other clause, which contains the main message It is true that some children are late talkers The subject of the reporting clause is the pronoun 'it', which refers forward to the 'that'-clause The verb is now a link verb (Chapter 3) and not a special reporting verb A Grammar of Examples All the examples are taken from texts, usually with no editing at all It is now generally accepted that it is extremely difficult to invent examples which sound realistic, and which have all the features of natural examples I am convinced that it is essential for a learner of English to learn from actual examples, examples that can be trusted because they have been used in real communication From a Cobuild perspective, no argument is needed At Cobuild there are file stores bulging with examples, and we not need to invent any By examining these real examples closely, we are gradually finding out some of the ways they differ from made-up examples Until we know a lot more about naturalness in language we not think it is safe to use invented examples There is a special note developing this point, which can be found immediately after this Introduction A Grammar of Classes The actual words and phrases that are regularly used in each structure are printed in the grammar in a series of lists Instead of just a few illustrative examples, this grammar gives information about the grammar of a large number of words The student can get a good idea of how large or small a grammatical class is, how many words a certain rule applies to The teacher has the raw material for making up exercises that suit a particular group of students, and can point to general features of a grammatical class Most of these lists, as far as we know, have never been available before They are worth detailed investigation by student and teacher, because these lists provide the main link between the abstractions of grammar and the realities of texts In grammar lists of this kind are called 'classes'; a class is the grouping together of words and phrases which all behave in the same way Hence this grammar is very much a grammar of classes because it features so many lists of words and phrases The job of preparing the lists has been one of the most interesting and challenging problems in the preparation of this book The computer does the first stage, and produces a fist by searching out all the words that fit a pattern it is given For example, it might be asked to pick all the words that end in '-ing' and not have a corresponding form without the '-ing' The first list it produces includes such words as 'overweening', and 'pettifogging', which are not very common, and which in our view can be left to a later stage of language learning Also found are 'blithering' and 'whopping', which have a special function and are treated in a separate paragraph 2.41 A few words fit the pattern well but are only found in very restricted combinations, or collocations 'Piping' goes with 'voice', and 'gangling' goes with 'youth' or 'boy' Since grammar mostly deals with generalities, we feel that it could be misleading to print them in fists which are intended to encourage composition At present the computer has difficulties in detecting similarities and differences of meaning But in the Cobuild database notes on meaning are made by the compilers, and the computer can also report back on this information So, for example, it will know that in the case of 'fetching', there is a verb to 'fetch', but it does not have the same meaning In most cases we omit a word like 'fetching' from our lists, to avoid confusion; otherwise the grammar would be full of special notes If we put it in, we give an appropriate warning In the summer of 1989 I worked with a large number of English teachers in Europe, South East Asia and South America, to find out their reactions to our lists and to have their suggestions for revising them and editing them The clear message was that the lists, to be teachable, should be orderly and comprehensive Problem cases, on the whole, should be omitted rather than explained in a grammar at this level: on the other hand words which an experienced teacher would expect to find in a list should be there, or there should be an explanation The results of aft this careful editing can be found in the lists at, for example, 2.77, 2.78, and 2.79 Wherever we can see a good reason, we put the words and phrases in a list in a meaningful arrangement This approach was suggested in the teachers' workshops, and on that basis, for example, we put verbs with a prefix (2.79) in a different list from other verbs (2.78) which behave in the same way Another good example of this can be found at 1.21, where in a single list we put in separate groups animals, fish, words ending in '-craft', foreign words ending in '-s', and a miscellaneous list These all share the same feature, namely that they can be either singular or plural nouns without any change of form—moose, salmon, aircraft, corps, crossroads From a purely grammatical point of view they could all go in a single alphabetical list: however from a teaching and learning point of view it is helpful to have them further classified A Grammar of Meanings Many English words have several meanings and uses This is particularly true of the common words which make up most of our everyday language Because of this it is difficult to make statements about the grammatical behaviour of a word, as this can vary according to its meaning For example, in one meaning a verb may be transitive, and in another meaning intransitive An instance of this is 'manage', which in its meaning of 'be responsible for controlling an organization, business, or system' is transitive, and in its meaning of 'be able to continue with a reasonable way of life, even though you not have much money' is intransitive, usually followed by an adverbial phrase Drouet returned to Ecuador to manage a travel agency I don't know if I can manage much longer Each meaning of a word may well have its own grammar, and it is unlikely that the statements about a word will cover all its meanings However, the grammar would be very long and cumbersome if each statement had to indicate which meaning was being referred to Throughout this grammar, therefore, the examples and the lists have been chosen so that the relevant meaning is the one that should first come to mind Many users will need a little time to adjust to this; we have lived so long with the assumption that grammar is independent of lexical meaning that it will be surprising to many people to see that grammar and lexis are very closely related Where the choice of one word in a structure is very closely connected with the choice of another, this is pointed out For example, the preposition 'aboard' is almost always used with a singular count noun referring to a form of transport such as 'ship', 'plane', 'train', or 'bus' .two weeks aboard the royal yacht Britannia Another example is a verb referring to physical senses such as 'see', 'feel', 'near', and 'smell' When such a verb is used to refer to the present time, it is typically preceded by the modal 'can' or 'can't' rather than being in the simple present tense: I can see George's face as clearly as if he were here with me When we come down, I can smell the aroma from the frying trout However, some of the verbs can be used with other, non-physical meanings, and in the other meanings the simple present tense is much used I see you had a good trip Many people feel that he should resign immediately This grammar is a halfway house between grammars which ignore the meaning of words, and dictionaries which give some grammatical information We have left out reference to uncommon meanings, and we only occasionally draw attention to distinctions of meaning that entail a different grammar If you think about it, it is obvious that different meanings of a word are likely to occur in different structures The meaning of a word includes the relations it makes with other words; so a verb such as 'see' in its physical meaning is likely to go along with a noun that means what was seen, or perhaps an adverb such as 'well' which gives an evaluation of the power of seeing When 'see' is used to mean something like 'understand', it will naturally be followed by a 'that'-clause On the rare occasions when it has a noun group as object, the noun will be something like 'problem', 'point', or 'position'—nouns describing messages A Grammar for Access When using a grammar, it is often difficult to find the information that you want This is often the biggest single problem for users of grammars, and a good reason why grammars are often unpopular with students This grammar makes a special effort to support the user, and there are several interlocking systems of access The well-known grammatical terms are all used here—subject and object, present and past tense, and so on New terms are kept to a minimum and are only used where there is no obvious alternative A glossary of terms is provided and they are also, of course, all listed in the index There is a contents list and chart at the beginning of the book and a more detailed contents list at the beginning of each chapter Using this or the index, the student will be able to find the section or paragraph where a function is associated with a structure By reading around a little, the student will find a few alternatives, or will learn more about the exact meaning of the structure Throughout the book there is an extra column at the side which shows the topic of almost every paragraph, and there are frequent additional headings for each section of a chapter At the top of each page is another heading to guide the user Each paragraph is written lo be read separately from every other, so that a small piece of information can be found and understood without the user having to read a whole section But if a user does want to read straight through a section or chapter, it will be found both readable and interesting A Grammar for Production The main purpose of this grammar is to help students to choose structures which accurately express the meanings they want to create Hence the book is largely organized around the functions or meanings In particular, we set out many 'productive features' to guide the student towards confidence in personal expression In some areas of grammar the rules are very flexible Rather than giving a definite class, we feel it is better to give guidance so that the user can make individual choices, with no serious risk of error By describing the language in this way, we give plenty of scope for creativity and innovation, a feature which is not commonly found in grammars There are many productive features in current English Some are well-known, for example the fact almost any noun in English can modify almost any other noun For example, the noun 'steam' can be used in, among others, the following combinations: 'steam bath', 'steam boiler', 'steam coal', 'steam engine', 'steam iron', 'steam power', steam radio', 'steam train', 'steam yacht', and even 'a flatbed steam table' Just the act of putting two nouns together at random shows how a speaker of the language immediately searches for a meaningful interpretation trick finger There is no accepted meaning of 'trick finger' It could be a medical problem, or a skill similar to juggling But it is grammatically acceptable, and invites us to imagine a meaning for it A productive feature invites and encourages us to use our imagination The list of words and phrases that will fit a structure is often impossible to define completely There may be a number of words in regular use, but in addition to that many other possibilities, offering the user a safe place to experiment Other places in the grammar allow very little variation, and the learner must simply keep to the rules in these cases Many grammar books concentrate on these restrictive rules, and make grammar appear to be a dangerous area where the main job is to avoid mistakes 'You this, and you don't that.' In this grammar we concentrate on positive statements, and relate function to structure 'If you want to this, then you say that.' Although there are many potential productive features, in this grammar we have only introduced the main and most obvious ones If we find that this approach is popular with teachers and learners, it may be possible gradually to shift the whole perspective away from grammar as a list of arbitrary problems, and towards grammar as a means of free expression We have tried to produce a grammar of real English—the English that people speak and write, it contains detailed information about English, collected from the large corpus we have built up, and it is new both in what it says and in the relationship between its statements and the evidence on which they are based It is designed above all to be really useful to student and teacher Note on Examples One of the really unusual features of this grammar is that all the examples are chosen from the Birmingham corpora of texts There is a central collection of about twenty million words, supplemented by many other sources of current English, including The Times newspaper I believe this to be a sound basis for a grammar, and I think that it is very important for learners and other users to examine and study only reel instances of a language This is particularly important when they are using the examples as models for their own usage Some great grammars of English—for example Otto Jespersen's A Modern English Grammar— support each statement with citations from published books, just as the major dictionaries of English This provides hard evidence for the statements, and gives important information in the surrounding context There is no justification for inventing examples To illustrate a simple subject-verb clause, something like 'Birds sing' is not good enough With the Cobuild database it is not difficult to find examples even of a fairly rare event like this structure 'Trains stopped' is a genuine example, and so is 'Frey agreed' Even in a two-word structure it can be seen that the real examples have a commutative value that the invented one lacks However, the job of searching shows us how rare such a structure is, and makes us wonder if it should be prominent in a grammar It is sad that many teachers seem doomed to work with invented material However, I would like to make a distinction between the formal presentation of an instance of a language, and the quick, informal examples that teachers have to produce from their own resources many times a day, without warning The latter are not intended as reliable models to follow, but as explanations of a specific point The teacher will, and must, rely on personal competence, just as a teacher of any other subject will call on memory rather than look everything up There is a big difference between this and putting into print as an example of usage a stretch of English that is not known to have been used The mind plays tricks, and, specially, is unreliable when one is thinking about very short utterances, without a clear context to support them Perhaps the biggest single improvement for language teaching is the ability of the computer to find and organize real examples Our experience in the classroom with real examples is that learners have a lot less difficulty with them than is often supposed These examples, after all, are the kind of material that the learner will have to understand eventually; learners appreciate and know instinctively how to cope with the loose ends of natural examples; they know they can trust them and learn directly from them The independence of real examples is their strength They are carefully selected instances of good usage A set of real examples may show, collectively, aspects of the language that are not obvious individually The moment work stops, disorder is liable to freak out If he gets promoted, all hell will break out This caused an epidemic to break out among them This final destructive fever had to break out somewhere Note that it is bad things that break out, not good ones Any such points emerging from a set of constructed examples could not, of course, be trusted People who work with languages should be open to what they can learn from this new source of information There is no doubt at all that new language teaching materials will rely more and more on the evidence from large text stores, and that in a few years' time teachers will look back and wonder how they coped with the lifeless examples they used to work with This book, along with the Cobuild Dictionaries and the Cobuild English Course, gives a first glimpse of what it is like to have access to real examples John Sinclair Editor-in-Chief Cobuild Professor of Modern English Language University of Birmingham Guide to the Use of the Grammar The Collins Cobuild English Grammar is designed to be used both for quick reference and for study in depth For example, the use of the word 'before' with specific tenses is dealt with in Chapter 5, and the differences in meaning between 'may' and 'might' are dealt with in Chapter The book can also be used more broadly, to find out, for example, a great deal about the behaviour of adjectives (Chapter 2) or the transitivity of clauses (Chapter 3) In order for you to use it as efficiently and effectively as possible, we have included a number of different ways to help you find the information you are looking for Organization of the main text The main text of the Grammar is divided into ten Chapters The first two Chapters deal with the noun group, Chapters 3, 4, and with the verb group, Chapter with adverbs and prepositions, Chapter with reporting, Chapter with joining clauses and sentences, and Chapters and 10 with continuous text The Cobuild Grammar Chart on pages xxiv-xxv shows the main subdivisions of the text, and the different word classes dealt with in each Chapter Each Chapter consists of a series of main topics and each topic is divided into sections The section headings are repeated at the top of the appropriate right hand pages, so that it is easy to find the sections Each individual paragraph in the Chapter is numbered, so that Chapter runs from 1.1 to 1.236, Chapter from 2.1 to 2.320 and so on This numbering system makes it easy for the user to refer to different but related points There are cross-references throughout the text, either pointing to the main place where a topic is dealt with or to another paragraph where more information is given Most paragraphs also have a heading in a column on the left of the main text, saying in three or four words what the paragraph dealt with, especially which grammatical structure is being explained Those paragraphs that not have a Left Column heading either summarize information which is about to be given in more detail, as is usually the case immediately after a section heading, or they continue the subject matter of the last Left Column heading For example, in Chapter paragraph 1.119 has a Left Column heading which says 'mass nouns' Paragraphs 1.120 and 1.121 not have a Left Column heading because they are still explaining mass nouns Some Left Column headings not show specifically what the paragraph deals with, but indicate information of a rather different kind The headings are 'Warning', 'Usage Note', and 'Productive Feature' 'Warning' highlights points where we know that people often have problems with a particular grammatical feature of English, because it is different from what you would expect, for example because it is a feature where English is different from many other languages 'Usage Note' gives information about the use of individual words or small groups of words This information is important but cannot be generalized into a grammatical rule The Usage Notes will therefore help you to distinguish those features which are relevant for the understating of particular words from those features which are relevant to large number of words 'Productive Feature' indicates that the rule that has been mentioned can be applied quite freely in English to a very large number of words For example, it is nearly always possible to make the present participle of a verb into an adjective used in front of a noun This is therefore labelled 'Productive Feature' in the Left Column By taking note of these features, you can use the rules that have been presented in a creative and original manner, giving you greater freedom of expression in English Productive Features are explained in greater detail in the Introduction Most of the grammatical statements that are made are followed by examples showing the structure in use These examples are all taken from the Cobuild collections of texts, and show how the structures have been used naturally in speech or writing The examples therefore give important information about the typical use of a structure, the words it is frequently used with, and the contexts in which it is likely lo occur More information about the examples and how they can be used will be found in the Note on Examples on page x Wherever appropriate, grammatical statements in this book are followed by lists of the words which typically exemplify that grammatical point For example, in Chapter we say that many verbs can be either transitive or intransitive with the same meaning This statement is followed by a list of verbs that are frequently used in this way The lists should help to increase awareness of the use of English, going beyond the actual examples given to other words which behave in similar ways They show whether the point being made is relevant to a small number or a large number of words If the word class is small, then all members of it are given If it is large, then the most frequently used members are given These lists can be used to help you increase your vocabulary and to check that you are using newly-learned English words correctly There is also a book of Cobuild Grammar Exercises, in which the lists are used as the basis of many exercises, for those students who want more practice in a particular area of grammar Additional contents In addition to the main text, there are various other sections which are included to help you to get the most out of this Grammar These additional sections are described below Introduction The Introduction sets out the principles from which the grammar has been developed It explains the close relationship which exists between function and structure, which is the basis of this Grammar, and it explains the type of functional approach that is taken Cobuild Grammar Chart The Cobuild Grammar Chart sets out in schematic form the contents of the grammar It shows the progression from word to group to clause to sentence, and shows where the different word classes are focused on It also shows the main discourse or text topic in each chapter For example, Chapter focuses on 'mood', 'negation' and 'modality' at clause level, as these are expressed through the verb group The individual words that are dealt with are the modal verbs and such as 'not' and 'never' The whole Chapter shows different ways of expressing attitudes to what is being said, and so this is the main discourse topic of the Chapter Glossary of Grammatical Terms The Glossary explains the meaning of grammatical terms It features the terms that are systematically used in this grammar, and also includes terms that are used in other grammars, with a cross-reference to the term used in this book, where appropriate For example, this grammar talks about 'noun groups', whereas some other grammars call them 'noun phrases' or 'nominal groups' All three of these terms are mentioned in the Glossary, with the explanation being given at 'noun group' 10