Basic English Syntax with Exercises

bracketed representation

1.3.3 Grammatical aspects of meaning

Consider the following bracketed sentence:

1.3.3 Grammatical aspects of meaning

In the bracketed sentence here, the complementiser is if and we can see that the difference between this and the previous case is that here the sentence is interpreted as a question, not a statement as previously. The sentence beginning with that is declarative and the one beginning with if is interrogative. Given that the only difference between the two is the complementiser, it seems reasonable to assume that this is what the complementiser contributes to the meaning of the sentence. The distinction between declarative and interrogative is known as the force of the sentence and hence complementisers contribute to this aspect of sentence meaning.

1.3.5.1 Inflections

Modal auxiliaries are also in complementary distribution with other elements of the clause. But before we can discuss this, we need to distinguish between two types of clause. Consider the clauses in brackets in the following:

2.1.1 The building blocks of sentences

It is fairly clear that the bracketed part of the sentence in (2b) is the exact same sentence as stands alone in (2a) and that the elements that they contain are in the same positions in both cases. It therefore follows that (2b) is not simply a string of words, but has a structure whereby it is made up of things which themselves are made up of other things. We can represent this situation in the following way:

2.1.5 Structural terminology

There is another popular way of representing structure, which we have made some use of above without comment. This is the use of brackets to represent constituents. For example, the sentence we discussed above the postwoman pestered the doctor on his birthday can be represented as follows:

2.1.5 Structural terminology

The way this works is that each constituent is surrounded by square brackets and so a constituent can be determined by finding an open bracket ‘[’ to its left and the corresponding close bracket ‘]’ to the right. Thus, the postwoman in (29) is defined as a constituent as it has an open bracket immediately to its left and a close bracket immediately to its right.

2.1.5 Structural terminology

Admittedly, it is harder to see the structure of a sentence when represented with brackets than with a tree, as it takes some working out which open brackets go along with which close bracket. However, bracketings are a lot more convenient to use, especially if we only want to concentrate on certain aspects of a structure. So, for example, above we represented an embedded sentence using brackets:

2.1.5 Structural terminology

This partial bracketing demonstrates at a glance how the main sentence contains an embedded one and so bracketing can be a very useful way of describing simple structures.