3. Grammar and Literary Style

3. Grammar and Literary Style

Grammar & Literary Style: Introduction

·      Many people resist the idea of analyzing the grammar of sentences in a poem or a novel because they feel it destroys their enjoyment of the text. 

·      However, knowing how something works does not necessarily always require losing pleasure in it. Think of a beautifully crafted clock and its component parts. If you knew how it was put together, and understood how all the parts were interconnected with each other? Some clocks even openly display the way that they work as part of their aesthetic appeal.

·      Stylistic analysis of a text allows us to examine the workings of the text. 

·      This breaking down of the text into component parts enables us to analyse each component on its own terms, and understand how it fits together with other components. 

·      When it’s put back together again, into a sentence, or a set of sentences, we can then see more clearly the relationships between them which will increase our understanding and consequently our appreciation of the text as a whole.

Keywords:

·      Normal: Ordinary, everyday conversational use of language

·      Deviant: the ways in which literary language can be said to differ from more everyday, non-literary language

·      Marked: a sentence that in some way deviates from a grammatical norm

Fast asleep she was

·      The words are arranged in a way that doesn’t draw attention to any specific elements within them. 

·      Unmarked: sentences which follow the more usual pattern

She was fast asleep

·      A sentence which is grammatically marked, with a shift in emphasis on these particular words.

She fast asleep was

·      We have disrupted the grammatical pattern even more, and we would probably agree as speakers of English that this sentence is one that we probably wouldn’t use in our everyday speech. 

What is Grammar?

·      There are many different approaches to grammar, all of which serve different kinds of purposes.

Attitudes to Grammar: Prescription and Description 

·      A prescriptive approach to grammar is based on the notion that a native speaker’s language usage can be right or wrong. The function of traditional grammar books was to provide a set of instructions that had to be adhered to if a sentence was to be considered stylistically correct. You are probably familiar with some of these, such as:

don’t start a sentence with ‘and’
don’t split infinitives
don’t end a sentence with a preposition
don’t use third person plural pronoun they to refer to a non-specific singular third person (e.g. someone)

all of which are sometimes considered to be stylistically ‘bad form’. 

·      Non-standard features of the language, such as the use of the double negative (e.g. ‘you ain’t seen nothing yet’) which is a feature of many dialects of English, would be considered to be just plain wrong.  

Attitudes to Grammar: Prescription and Description

·      The other way of looking at grammar is from the descriptive viewpoint. 

·      Descriptive grammar, as the name suggests, aims to describe what happens when language is used by recording what it actually is that native speakers do with language, rather than what somebody says they should be doing. However, even descriptive grammar has tended to focus on standard forms rather than on non-standard varieties of English.

·      The prescriptivist notion that there are right and wrongways of using language is frequently the subject of public debate, where people air strong views about the ‘correctness’ or ‘sloppiness’ of language use and complain about falling standards in the use of English

·      In practice, most people, including writers, use language in various ways depending on who is being addressed, where they are, and what kind of effect they want to produce. In literary language particularly, the structures of grammar can be ‘stretched’ or disrupted in various ways to produce different effects.

·      In the following extract, two of the prescriptive ‘rules’ listed above are being broken quite deliberately:

You spent your childhood on the road, here today, gone tomorrow; you grew up a restless man. You loved change. And fornication. And trouble. And, funnily enough, towards the end, you loved butterflies. Peregrine Hazard, lost among the butterflies, lost in the jungle, vanished away as neatly and completely as if you had become the object of one of those conjuring tricks you were so fond of. 

·      In this passage, Angela Carter has three sentences that begin with ‘and’. Two of those sentences are incomplete, and she ends the last sentence with the preposition ‘of’!

Two Levels of Grammar: Morphology and Syntax 

·      Morphology is the part of grammar which provides rules for combining the linguistic units that form words. 

o  The smallest unit that carries grammatical information in a language is called a morpheme. For example, we can transform an adjective into an adverb, or an adjective into a noun, by combining two morphemes. The morpheme (and adjective) quietplus the morpheme -ly becomes the adverb quietly (a word now made up of two morphemes); quiet plus -ness, becomes the noun quietness. The word quiet is a ‘free’ morpheme, which means it can be used on its own, while -ly and -ness are ‘bound’ morphemes, which have to be attached to another word. 

o  These kinds of morphemes are called derivational morphemes because they are used to build up new words. Although they do not carry any semantic meaning on their own, they do indicate some important information when attached to a free morpheme, for example, we know that a word ending in -ness indicates a state of some kind, i.e. quietness is a state of being quiet. The -ly ending for adverbs indicates how something was done, e.g. zv5 5 ‘she talked quietly’.

o  Identify the different morphemes, and decide whether they are ‘free’ or ‘bound’: 

o  We can list -in, -ful, -ness, -ly and -i as bound morphemes, while convenient, truth, definite, deliberate, ice, level and head fall into the free morpheme category.

o  In English, one of the ways we signal a change in tense is by adding the past tense morpheme -ed to a verb stem, which is realised phonetically as /d/ as in flowed, /Id/ as in wanted, or /t/ as in stretched. So ‘Jane wants to be a movie star’ can be changed into a past tense sentence by adding an element to the main verb: ‘Jane wanted to be a movie star’. 

o  We can also give grammatical information about numbers through morphological combinations and changes: we can add the morpheme -s (which is pronounced in different ways depending on the phonological context; for example, it is realised as /s/ as in cats, /z/ as in dogs, and /Iz/ as in horses) to make words plural. 

o  In standard English, the morpheme (s) also carries information about a person, in relation to the subject of a verb (I want, Jane wants; he jumps, they jump). These second types of morphemes are called inflectional morphemes, and the -ed of headed in the activity above falls into this category.

o  Morphology also gives us rules for combining free morphemes, that is to say, morphemes which carry meaning in their own right. Play and ground or graveand yard are examples of free morphemes which can be combined to form playground and graveyardrespectively.

o  Some writers use this linguistic potential of combining words to create new and sometimes ambiguous meanings. In the following stanza from a poem by E.E.Cummings, the writer creates the adjective moonly out of the morphemes moon and - ly, and a new verb, unbe, out of the morphemes un and be (itrefers to love):

It is most mad and moonly

and less it shall unbe
than all the sea which only

is deeper than the sea.

·      The second level of grammar is the syntactic level. Syntaxprovides rules for combining words to make sentences. So for instance, we know that we can combine the words my,name, is and Ram, in various possible grammatical ways:

My name is Ram.
Ram is my name.
Is my name Ram?
Is Ram my name?

o  But not:

is name Ram my
Or
name Ram my is

o  There is the fifth combination:

Ram, my name is. 

which is arguably slightly more unusual than the others, but which is nevertheless grammatically acceptable as a way of emphasising, or foregrounding. Similar examples are:  

Snowing, it was.

Black, my cat is. 

Word Classes

o  There are several different categories or classes of words available in grammar. The main classes of words that we may already be familiar with in English are: 

Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions

o Being able to recognise the class of a word is particularly helpful in the stylistic analysis since it will enable one to identify and describe the various structural components in texts. Once we label these components, one will then be able to identify not only regular ways in which they combine, but also to recognise changes in those patterns and variations between texts.

Identifying Word Classes

·      One way of deciding what category a particular word should be assigned to is by establishing what it is actually doing and where it occurs in a sentence. For example, we know what adverbs typically come after verbs as in:

Jim typed slowly.

The baby cried loudly. 

·      The presence of a determiner (the, a, an, some etc.), indicates that one of the words following it will be a noun. The noun may occur next to the determiner, i.e. in a structure the +x, the x will probably be a noun. For example:

the caterpillar

a leaf

some salami

·      It may however be separated from the determiner by some other words, typically adjectives, as in:

the furry caterpillar

a wrinkled brown leaf

some disgusting salami 

·      One way to find out which is the noun is to see which one is essential and ‘belongs’ with the determiner; e.g. you can say the caterpillar but not the furry, and a leaf but not awrinkled brown; some salami but not some disgusting. 

o  Another characteristic of nouns is that they can also be inflected for numbers by adding the plural morpheme -s, pronounced in this example as /z/: 

Ten furry caterpillars

o  However (confusingly!), words don’t always stay in a particular class and depending on their position in a sentence, can sometimes change their syntactic category. We can experiment with this idea by taking a sentence and substituting other possible words in a particular slot, and see what happens. In the following headline, two words are being used in classes other than the ones someone writing a grammar book might assign them to: 

Six questioned over ‘plot to make weapon deals with criminals’. 

o  Six is usually described as a particular kind of adjective, called a numeral in grammar books, and its position in a sentence is often before a noun: six EGGS; six PRINCESSES; six very fat and happy KITTENS (the nouns in these phrases are in upper case). 

o  However, in the headline, the word six is not behaving like a numeral, but more like a noun (similar examples are The Birmingham Six, The Guildford Four). We have to conclude that six refers to six people, rather than six eggs, princesses or kittens.

o  The word weapon on the other hand, usually belongs to the noun class, as in the weapon; three weapons; the dangerous weapon (i.e. the determiner the can be put in front of weapon; it can be made plural by adding an -s morpheme, and an adjective, such as dangerous, can be inserted between the and weapon).

o  However, in this example, it modifies the word deal. In other words, it tells us what kind of deal was made: a weapon deal rather than a fair deal or a dirty deal, so it is syntactically doing the work of an adjective in this case. Thus both the words six and weapon are being used in categories other than the ones they might usually be expected to belong to. This is actually a very common linguistic feature of newspaper headlines and is due to constraints on space and the need to provide a succinct, often eye-catching, lead to a news story. 

o  To summarise the point we have been making here: as these examples show, words may look as if they belong in one grammatical category, like noun or verb or adjective, but in practice can change categories when they are shifted around to occupy different structural positions in sentences. This means that we can call a word a noun, a verb, or an adjective, but it is the position it occupies in the sentence which really counts. 

o  Lets see another extract from the poem by e. e. cummings: 

love is less always than to win

less never than alive

o  Always and never are usually categorised as temporal adverbs, i.e. they provide further information about the time something happens.

o  We can illustrate this further with a poem by Dylan Thomas called ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’. In this title line, there are some words which in standard English usage would not normally occur in the place that they occur here. First of all, think about what kind of word go is. 

o  The phrase go gentle would usually be go gently. The poet has used an adjective in this particular slot in the sentence instead of an adverb. He also uses another adjective, good, in an unusual way in this line. What are the kinds of adjectives we would usually use to describe the noun night? Dark, scary, moonlit or frosty spring to mind, but probably not good, except within the context of a farewell. So in this line, we have two unusual combinations of words that would not occur in standard English usage. 

Open and Closed Class Words

·      Native speakers of a language have grammatical knowledge which enables them to distinguish between possible combinations of words in a sentence, and impossible combinations, even when the words themselves are unfamiliar. We can illustrate how this knowledge works by using the following sentence (found in language classes everywhere!) from Lewis Carroll’s poem ‘Jabberwocky’:

Twas brillig and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gamble in the wabe. 

·      Here, we recognise that wabe is a noun because it is preceded by a determiner, the. As we have seen, our knowledge of English grammar tells us that in any structure made up of the +x, x will be a noun. Similarly, we recognise the slithy toves as having the structure of determiner+adjective+noun, because of the positions of the words in relation to each other: 

o  The comes first, toves comes last, and slithy is between the two, so this fits our knowledge of similar combinations such as the slimy toves or the muddy toves. The fact that toves also carries the inflectional plural morpheme -s indicates that it is a noun, while slithy carries the adjectival morpheme y.          

o  Our native speaker knowledge also allows us to recognise gyre and gimble as verbs. One structural feature that enables us to do this is the presence of the word did, as in similar structures like they did run, or they did jump, which marks these verbs for past tense. We know that in the structure x+ did +y, whatever goes in the y slot will probably be some form of a verb, so gyre and gimble belong to the same class of words as run and jump.

o  Another way of recognising verbs is that they carry inflectional morphemes like -ed and -ing. So if we see the words the toves gimbled or the toves were gyringthen again, we would know that gimbled and gyringwere verbs. 

Describing Noun and Verb Phrases

·      In the following section, we will look at how nouns and verbs can form part of larger units called noun phrases and verb phrases:

The Noun Phrase

o  A definition of a noun is that it is a word that refers to something in the world, which can be concrete, like a table or house, or abstract like love or idea, or a person, like Hari Sharma. Often we need to do more than just refer to something by name, we need to qualify it or differentiate it from other similar things. We can do this by making it more specific, or more elaborate, through a process called a modification. Nouns are often preceded by a determiner such as the.

o  Nouns can be premodified further by adding some information before the main noun itself. They can also be postmodified, by adding information after the noun. Look at the following examples: the main noun (often referred to in grammar books as the head noun) in each one is stick, and the extra information is in upper case, 

Stick
THE stick
THE OLD stick
THE stick WITH IVORY HANDLE
THE stick THAT BELONGS TO MY GRANDMOTHER

o  All the examples above are known grammatically as noun phrases. They can be premodified by an adjective, such as old, by a prepositional phrase (i.e. a phrase that begins with a preposition) such as with the ivory handle, and by a whole new clause such as that belongs to my grandmother. We can even put all these pre- and post-modifying elements together to make a very long noun phrase:

THE OLD stick WITH THE IVORY HANDLE THAT BELONGS TO MY GRANDMOTHER

o  Noun phrases can refer very explicitly to a person or thing by name (John Lennon, Buckingham Palace) or much less explicitly, in the form of a pronoun (he, it) where the information about who ‘he’, or what ‘it’ is, is given earlier or sometimes later on in the text. In spoken language, this information is often recovered from the context of an utterance, rather than from the surrounding text. For instance,

It’s got an ivory handle

The Verb Phrase

·      Verbs are very complex grammatical entities. One way of describing a verb is as a type of word that enables you to say something about the subject of the sentence. Verbs are sometimes referred to as ‘doing’ words, but this is misleading as many verbs have no relation zv6 6 to ‘doing’ anything at all! In the following examples, only two verbs, eat and drive, could be said to describe an action of some sort: 

John EATS oranges.
Jan’s house IS at the end of the street.
That red car BELONGS to my mother. 
Susan’s idea TURNED OUT to be a disaster. 
He DRIVES to work every day. 

o  A verb phrase can contain different kinds of grammatical information. Firstly, the lexical verbcarries the meaning content, which in the above examples are: eat, be, belong, turn out and drive. 

o  Within the verb phrase, there is also information about the tense (past and present). In the above examples, drives is a present tense verb form (marked by the -smorpheme), while turned out is a past tense form (marked by the -ed morpheme). 

o  Verb phrases can also carry information about mood(or modality). This is the category of grammar that gives us information about a speaker’s attitude towards their utterance. Modality can convey degrees of possibility, certainty or doubt, as well as information about obligation, permission or suggestion. We can change the modality of John eats oranges by adding modal words like should, can’t and won’t, each of which gives us more information about John and the oranges, contained within the verb phrase: 

John should eat oranges (i.e. they are good for him) 
John can’t eat oranges (i.e. they are bad for him) 
John won’t eat oranges (i.e. he doesn’t like them) 

o  A verb phrase can also give us information about an aspect; this is the category of grammar that indicates whether an action or state of affairs is completed or not, for example: 

I’m watching EastEnders (the activity is not yet complete)
I watched EastEnders last night (the activity is over and complete) 

o  Identify the lexical verb in each of the following sentences: 

Six North Africans were playing boule beneath Flaubert’s statue. 
We should buy her some flowers.
It was an uncertain spring.
Versace has come up with a feisty new fragrance. I’ve been to London.

o  The lexical verbs are: play, buy, was, come up withand been. You will notice that in the case of was, the lexical verb is also inflected for the past tense. The other elements in the verb phrase which carry information about tense, mood and aspect are called auxiliary verbs. In the above sentences, the auxiliaries are were, should, has, and ’ve (a contraction of have). 

Non-finite Verb Phrase

·      So far, the verb phrases we have been discussing have all carried information about tense, modality, and aspect. These are called finite verb phrases because they contain a finite, main verb. There is another category of verbs, called non-finite verbs, which do not carry this kind of information. These verbs can be in the form of an infinitive, as in TO see, TO boldly go; a gerundive, as in seeING, boldly goING, or a past participle, as in as SEEN on TV. 

o  In the extract below, the first sentence contains examples of both a finite and a non-finite verb phrase:

He stood at the hall door turningthe ring, turning the heavy signet ring upon his little finger while his glance travelled coolly, deliberately, over the round tables and basket chairs scattered about the glassed-in veranda. He pursed his lips—he might have been going to whistle—but he did not whistle—only turned the ring—turned the ring on his pink, freshly washed hands.

o  The first verb phrase: stood is finite, (i.e. it is marked for tense; the action described happened in the past). The second one, turning, is non-finite (i.e. it carries within it no information about when it happened). Non-finite verb phrases do particular kinds of work in a sentence; for example, they are often used as post-modifiers of noun phrases and thus could be said to have more in common with adjective phrases than they do with other kinds of verbs. An example of this kind of non-finite verb phrase in the above extract is scattered, which gives us more information about the round tables and basket chairs. 

o  In the passage below, Angela Carter uses a series of non-finite verb phrases in an unusual way:

You spent your childhood on the road, here today, gone tomorrow; you grew up a restless man. You loved change. And fornication. And trouble. And, funnily enough, towards the end, you loved butterflies. Peregrine Hazard, lost among the butterflies, lost in the jungle, vanished away as neatly and completely as if you had become the object of one of those conjuring tricks you were so fond of. 

o  If we look closely at the way vanished is used in this sentence, we can see that it occurs as the third element of a sequence of non-finite verb phrases, consisting of the past participle of the verb lose, which is used to post-modify the head noun phrase Peregrine Hazard:

o  If we look closely at the way vanished is used in this sentence, we can see that it occurs as the third element of a sequence of non-finite verb phrases, consisting of the past participle of the verb lose, which is used to post-modify the head noun phrase Peregrine Hazard:      

§  So if vanished is to fit into the pattern which has been established by the first two elements of the sequence we can read it as a non-finite verb. However, it could also be interpreted as a finite verb if we analyse the sentence structure as follows: 

Peregrine Hazard vanished away

which can be read as a complete sentence with vanished as the main verb.

Describing Sentences

·      A sentence is primarily a unit of written language. People do not speak in sentences but in utterances which may or may not be formed by what we generally think of as a ‘complete’ grammatical sentence. A grammatical sentence usually consists of a subject and a predicate. The subject is the noun phrase which starts the sentence, and the predicateis everything that comes after it. So in the sentence: 

John eats oranges

·      the subject is John, and the predicate is: eats oranges. In the following sentences the subject is on the left, and the predicate on the right: 

·      Most sentences will always contain at least one unit of subject and predicate, and this unit is called a clause.

Simple and Complex Sentences

·      Sentences can be of several types. A simple sentence is one which consists of a single clause. Clauses can also be joined together to form complex sentences. There are various ways of combining clauses:

·      Firstly, a coordinated sentence is one which consists of two or more clauses joined by a conjunction like and or but, as in the examples below: 

John eats oranges BUT he won’t touch bananas (2 clauses) 

John eats oranges BUT he won’t touch bananas AND apples are out of the question (3 clauses)

·      Another way of combining clauses is through a subordinate(rather than a coordinate) relationship. In this kind of relationship, the link between the clauses in the sentence is rather different.

When I get home I’ll cook supper.
Helen was wearing red, which had always been her favourite colour. 
If you can’t stand the heat, you should get a fire extinguisher. 

o  In the first example, the subordinate clause is when I get home, and the link between the two clauses is temporal, established by the conjunction when. The subordinate clause in the second sentence is called a relative clause. Relative clauses are often linked to the main clause by a relative pronoun such as who, which or that, and typically give more information about some element of the main clause (in this case, the red colour of the dress). In the final example, the relationship between the two clauses is conditional, where the conjunction: if establishes the link between two states of affairs. 

When I get home I’ll cook supper.
Helen was wearing red, which had always been her favourite colour. If you can’t stand the heat, you should get a fire extinguisher. 

Foregrounding & Grammatical Forms

o  What seems to distinguish literary from non-literary usage may be the extent to which the grammatical structure of a sentence is salient, or foregrounded in some way. Consider the following examples, both of which describe inner city decay. The first is from the Observer, (29 November 1995): 

The 1960s dream of high-rise living soon turned into a nightmare.

o  In this sentence, there is nothing grammatically unusual or ‘deviant’ in the way the words of the sentence are put together. 

o  In the following verse from a poem, the grammatical structure seems to be much more challenging, and makes more demands on our interpretive processing of these lines: 

Four storeys have no windows left to smash, 1 
but in the fifth a chipped sill buttresses 2 
mother and daughter the last mistresses 3 
of that black block condemned to stand, not 4 
crash. 

o  The sentence in line 2 of this verse that starts but in the fifth...is unusual in that the predicate of the sentence is made up of a sequence of embedded elements, as we can see if we write them out in a full form:

chipped sill buttresses mother and daughter 
who are the last mistresses of that black block 
which is condemned to stand, not crash. 

o  Furthermore, the main verb in this sentence is buttress. This word can be either a noun or a verb, but we would argue that it is more likely to occur as a noun in less literary contexts. 

o  In the following extract, what is the rule that has been broken in the first sentence? 

The red-haired woman, smiling, waving to the disappearing shore. She left the maharajah; she left innumerable other lights o’ passing love in towns and cities and theatres and railway stations all over the world. But Melchior she did not leave. 

o  We have seen that sentences normally consist of a subject and a predicate, and that the predicate normally contains a verb phrase. However, the first sentence here contains no main finite verb, and therefore should not occur as an independent unit, but looks as though it should be linked to another clause. Yet here it does occur on its own. 

o  Another way in which literary language can deviate from other kinds of language use is by disrupting the usual order of words in a sentence. We can illustrate this by looking at an extract from Shakespeare’sRichard II, which contains some sentences which could be described as having normal syntactic structure, and some which definitely could not! 

o  We have moved certain parts of the sentences around to make them sound more like ordinary, modern English, and did this because we recognise the ways in which these lines from zv7 8 Richard II are deviating from what can be considered as the normal syntactic pattern. For example, we know that like cursin line 5 should usually come at the end of the sentence rather than right near the beginning, before to tear us all to pieces. We also know that we three here part should be we three part here and that ne’er shallwould ordinarily be shall never.

o  In grammatical terms, we can say that the adverbial here usually comes at the end of a clause, as in: 

we’ll leave you here
we stop here
we can have lunch here

o  and we can also say that the negative particle never (or ne’er in this case) usually comes after the auxiliary verb, as in: 

I shall never see you again

o  So from these examples, we can see how the ‘literariness’ of language doesn’t just depend on the type of words used but also on the arrangement of those words into sentences. 

o  It is not only in poetry or dramatic texts that words get moved around to make different patterns in sentences. Fictional texts also frequently contain unusual grammatical patterns, as we can see by looking again at the extract from Wise Children: 

The red-haired woman, smiling, waving to the disappearing shore. She left the maharajah; she left innumerable other lights o’passing love in towns and cities and theatres and railway stations all over the world. But Melchior she did not leave. 

o  In this extract, Carter not only has a sentence without a main verb in it, she also uses a marked syntactic structure in the final one: 

But Melchior she did not leave 

Analysis of Grammar: Checklist

·      In this chapter we have been looking at some of the basic grammatical components of English, and describing how these combine to make sentences, both simple and complex. We have also introduced the linguistic units of noun phrases and verb phrases, and suggested some ways in which a grammatical analysis of literary language can enhance our understanding of a text and our pleasure in reading. 

·      After reading this chapter, there are various ways that you should be able to approach the analysis of grammatical structures in literary texts, both poetry and prose. Depending on the kind of text you are dealing with, some of the following procedures may be appropriate:

o  where there seems to be foregrounding on the level of lexis (all the words of the particular language), you can use morphological analysis to look at new combinations of words. 

o  where there is foregrounding on the level of word order and syntax (the arrangement of words to form a sentence), you can use your knowledge of word classes (i.e. nouns, verbs, adjectives etc.) to analyse unusual or ‘marked’ combinations.

o  again on the grammatical level, you can look for combinations and patterns in the use of different types of phrases: noun phrases and verb phrases which may contribute to a more literary usage of language, as well as analysing the structure of sentences. 

o  in all cases, you should find that being aware of the systems of the language, the rules which govern the combination of a range of grammatical elements, will make it possible for you to identify the more ‘deviant’, ‘marked’ or literary structures, from more ‘everyday’, non-literary usage of language, and thus be able to say more about the structural patterning in a text.