Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, A STUDENT'S INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH GRAMMAR (Cambridge University Press, 2005)
This chapter is an overview of what is to come, and is intended for use as a kind of executive summary of the entire book. But it introduces the most important grammatical categories and functions, and a lot of crucial terminology, so we've provided a few exercises on some of the material.
1. In the sentence This is the house that Jack built, the subject of the main clause is the noun phrase this, so you underline it once; the rest of the sentence is the predicate of the main clause, so you double-underline it. The main point of the exercise is just to force some concentration on where the break between subject and predicate comes. None of the examples given should be very difficult. Here are a few more illustrative examples. Instead of doing underlining we put the subject in a red block and the predicate in a green block.
| This chapter | is an overview of the whole book. |
| We | 've provided a few exercises on some of the material. |
| The main point of the exercise | is just to force some concentration on where the break between subject and predicate comes. |
| None of the examples given | should be very difficult. |
2. Since the subject comes before the predicate in a canonical clause, it is fairly easy to distinguish subjects from objects and predicative complements. Distinguishing objects from predicative complements is not quite so easy. The two properties mentioned on page 23 of the book are crucial. A fuller discussion is found in sections 3 and 4 of Chapter 4, and of course if this exercise is being done on an open-book basis the student can look ahead to that discussion too. Here are some examples with the subject in a red block, and the predicate in square brackets, and objects shown in a blue block, and predicative complements shown in a yellow block:
| Most children | [ hate | broccoli and similar vegetables | ]. |
| Broccoli | [ is | full of goodness | ]. |
| Everyone | [ should eat | lots of broccoli | whenever they can]. |
| Many doctors | [ consider | broccoli | capable of protecting the body against cancer | ]. |
3. Every word in each of these examples can be assigned to Adj, Adv, Co, D, N, Prep, Sub, or V. Keep in mind that under the analysis presented in this book, pronouns are just nouns of a special sort, so you treat them as nouns, and that auxiliaries (including the copula, be) are just verbs of a special sort, so you treat them as verbs.
Here's an example done for you (with different colors for the different categories):
| Many | older | members | disapprove | of | the | change. |
| D | Adj | N | V | Prep | D | N |
4. With this one you don't really need any hints. We've decided not to give any suggested solution. The exercise is easy provided there is no limit to the total number of words in the sentence, and there is no upper limit on how many right answers there are. In fact it should be expected that every single student will turn in a different answer, even if millions of students do this exercise.
This is not an exaggeration. It is an interesting fact that in English text generally, if you look at how many different words could come next at a given point, it generally averages out to about 10 — very few at some points, but large numbers at some other points. So this means that if you write a 10-word sentence and someone else turns in the same 10-word sentence, the chances that it happened by accident (rather than because of plagiarism) are somewhere in the region of 1 in 10,000,000,000. And as sentences get longer, the probability of two people hitting on the same sentence by accident gets dramatically lower.
5. It's easy to construct a six-word sentence containing a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb, a preposition and a determinative. It's not so easy to construct a seven-word sentence contain the above six categories plus a coordinator, though it's definitely possible. Problems arise when we try to take it one step further and construct an eight-word sentence containing the above seven categories plus a subordinator. If you suspect that the answer is that it actually cannot be done, you should try to explain why, on the basis of general facts about clauses or sentences or phrases or whatever — not on the basis of what you did or thought or tried (don't write "No mattter how hard I tried it just never seemed to work out", or "None of the friends I talked to could do it either"; that is not going to be counted as good enough!). What you need to do is explain what subordinators are for, and what is the absolute minimum that has to be present in a clause with a subordinator, and why that means you can never (as far as we can see!) make an eight-word sentence containing one of each of the lexical categories.
6. This exercise asks for you to classify the underlined clauses as canonical or non-canonical, and for the non-canonical ones to say which non-canonical clause category or categories they belong to. Here's an example done:
They said I was unqualified because I didn't know any statistics.
Here the underlined clause is non-canonical. It illustrates the non-canonical categories of subordinate clause and negative clause.