Carl Bache

Essentials of Mastering English: A Concise Grammar

Essentials of Mastering English: A Concise Grammar is both an ideal companion for undergraduate students wishing to acquire a high level of grammatical proficiency and a readily accessible reference work for teachers of English at all levels. It provides an introduction to basic grammatical terms and to elementary syntactic description, enabling students to analyse sentences and utterances down to word level with a specification of both the form and the function of all constituents.

The Semantics of Grammatical Categories: A Dialectical Approach

In this paper I want to present a practical descriptive approach to the semantics of grammatical categories, especially of the binary type involving two forms only. In doing so, I hope to be able to attract the attention of linguists concerned with the structure of a comprehensive semantic theory of human language. Substitutional relations of a grammatical kind (as opposed to syntactic and lexical relations) are too often neglected in textbooks on modern semantics. For example, in Ruth Kempsons otherwise excellent introduction to semantic theory (Kempson, 1977), there is no mention of the semantics of grammatical categories at all. In my view, not only must such Substitutional relations be accommodated within a total theory of semantics – even on a narrow definition of the discipline – but they may provide important insights into the nature of meaning which will affect some of the current suppositions in semantic theory. In particular I shall attempt to shed light on the role of ‘subjectivity’ – a notion which is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore and which challenges the very common restriction among semanticists of the scope of semantics to just a truth-conditional component.

On categories in linguistics

Abstract This paper examines the use of the term ‘category ‘ in linguistics and proposes to give it a more precise metalinguistic status in morphological and morpho-syntactic descriptions. In the relevant sections of the metalanguage for such descriptions, categories should be regarded more specifically as ‘superordinate categories’ comprising a number of members which share a single semantic domain but differ with respect to their more precise profiling characteristics. The paper suggests that the metalanguage and the categories defined in it should be viewed as a cognitively salient absolute standard — a digital ‘expert system’ — against which analog language-specific data can be evaluated and described. A principled application of such an idealized metalanguage to linguistic reality ensures the necessary descriptive focus on variation and irregularity. The metalanguage is thus to be regarded as a useful instrument in linguistic research rather than simply a truthful reflection of what language is like. The paper illustrates the usefulness of such a strategic metalanguage in the analysis of ‘non-monadic’ forms, i.e. forms which conventionalize conceptual blends of different semantic domains and profiling characteristics.

Narrative when in English

This article examines the so-called ‘narrative when ’ construction in English. No one has come up with an entirely satisfactory description of this construction which accounts appropriately for both its syntax and content. The descriptive challenge is to explain the unusual balance between the main clause and the when clause: unlike an ordinary temporal when clause (which offers circumstantial information in relation to the main clause), a narrative when clause expresses the primary situation while the main clause merely has a supporting textual function. This article suggests a simple framework for the description of all when clauses within which narrative when clauses are very comfortably accommodated as one of the metaphorical extensions of the basic meaning and syntax of when .

Narrative before in English

This paper examines the so-called narrative use of before-clauses in English, as in They had hardly heard her explanation before Jack burst out crying. In such sentences the main situation is narrated by the before-clause, while the main clause offers contextual temporal specification of this situation. The attempt to cope with the descriptive challenge posed by this rather special balance of narrative impact between the two clauses takes its point of departure in Huddleston and Pullum’s (2002:1104) recognition of before as a “comparative governor” and in my findings in connection with a recent study on narrative when-clauses (Bache 2016). Narrative before-clauses are superficially very similar to temporal before-clauses (as in They heard her explanation before Jack called her parents), where the main situation is expressed by the main clause and the before-clause provides contextual temporal specification. However, narrative before-clauses are found to be not only pragmatically but also formally distinct from temporal before-clauses and therefore must be accommodated in our more general grammatical description of before. The basic approach to before as a comparative element goes some of the way to explain the special textual balance in narrative before-constructions, but it must be supplemented with the notion of “functional superordination” resulting from a special pattern of assertiveness, textual cohesion, and “main clause phenomena.” In the analysis of more than 7000 examples of before, the temporal-narrative distinction is found to be too crude. A new typology of constructions is therefore proposed which is sensitive to both formal criteria and textual strategies.

Mastering English: An Advanced Grammar for Non-Native and Native Speakers@@@Mastering English: A Student's Workbook and Guide

Mastering English presentsa new, pedagogically sound approach to English grammar. Breaking with the terse, and often dry, matter of fact mode of traditional grammars, the reader is taken along a reasoned course through the grammar of English. Both an advanced textbook and a reference work, Mastering English is different in a number of ways: It offers a simple but comprehensive syntactic system which enables the student to analyse any sentence down to word level with a specification of both the form and the function of constituents at all levels. It combines coherent discussion, rule presentation and rich examplification, rather than simply offering lists of facts. it includes a thorough treatment of a number of areas neglected by most other grammars, such as inversion, discontinuity, negation, and order and position of adverbials and adjectival modifiers.