Rodney Huddleston

A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language

An indispensable store of information on the English language, written by some of the best-known grammarians in the world.

The Contrast between Interrogatives and Questions.

This paper explores the relation between interrogative, a category of grammatical form, and question, a category of meaning. Interrogative contrasts with declarative, imperative, etc., in the system of clause type (not sentence type); a question defines a set of answers. Two kinds of interrogative are distinguished, closed and open - though in some languages they may be distinct primary classes. Three kinds of question are distinguished according to the way the set of answers is defined: polar, alternative and variable questions; another dimension distinguishes information from direction questions. Mismatches between interrogatives and questions are found in the areas of coordination, parentheticals, echoes and questions signalled only prosodically. Mismatches between interrogative phrases and questioned elements are also investigated.

The distribution and category status of adjectives and adverbs

It has long been argued that the environments in which adjectives and adverbs occur are mutually exclusive. This claim is based on a superficial observation that adjectives modify nouns, while adverbs modify other categories. In this paper, we argue that there are a substantial number of environments in English where complementarity, thus defined, does not hold. One interesting such environment is the function of modifier of nouns, and in one section of this paper we present a detailed analysis of a rarely observed construction in which adverbs, like adjectives, have this function. Complementarity between adjectives and adverbs is often used in support of a *

Past tense transportation in English

Poutsma (1926: 441–447) says of sentences like: (I) I could have got the money easily enough. that ‘the notion of completed action in this combination [is expressed] not in the finite verb, where it logically belongs, but in the following infinitive’. He speaks of this phenomenon as ‘tense-shifting’; I have preferred ‘past tense transportation’ (PTT) in order to make it clear that it is only the Past Tense that is involved, I and to avoid confusion with the quite different but more frequent use of ‘tense- shifting’ in accounts of the ‘sequence of tenses’ in indirect speech, etc., where a direct speech non-Past is commonly said to be ‘backshifted’ to a Past Tense (She is ill ∽ He said she was ill ).

Introduction to English Grammar

Works Cited Herbst, Thomas, David Heath, Ian F. Roe and Dieter Gotz (2004). A Valenry Dictionary of English. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Huddleston, Rodney (1984). Introduction to the Grammar of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mindt, Dieter (2000). An Empirical Grammar of the English Verb System. Berlin: Cornelsen. Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the Enghsh Language. London/New York: Longman.

Would have become : empty or modal will

In an earlier paper (Huddleston, 1977) I analysed the would of (I) If he had stayed in the army, he would have become a colonel as the unreal mood form of an epistemic modal verb WILL that figures in the underlying syntactic representation and falls within the semantic scope of a past element realized by HAVE. Palmer (1978) criticizes this analysis, claiming that WILL is ‘obviously’ semantically empty, a mere ‘dummy’ inserted to carry the mark of unreality – that would have become is ‘the Unreal and Past form of BECOME’.

Homonymy in the English verbal paradigm

Modern structural grammars of English have typically postulated much less homonymy in the verbal paradigm than traditional grammars - partly because of a shift from the word-and-paradigm model, partly because distinctions overtly marked in one verb are no longer necessarily carried over into the paradigms of all verbs. This paper defends the traditional practice of extending to all verbs the mood distinction phonologically marked in he was versus he were, but argues againts analysing the latter as the past tense counterpart of he be. The distinction of are versus be is likewise generalised, but the concordial distinctions of am versus are and indicative was versus were are not.

Fusion of functions: The syntax of once , twice and thrice

In this paper we present a detailed new analysis of the English expressions once, twice and thrice. These, we claim, are primarily compound determinatives, analogous in many respects to expressions like someone and somewhere. The new analysis exploits the framework of the Cambridge grammar of the English language (2002) in which the morphological nature of the compound determinative category reflects a fusion of functions, typically determiner (or modifier) and head of NP. We refine the notion of fusion of functions, and show that constructions which employ fusion of functions have properties which clearly distinguish them from superficially similar constructions which employ incorporation or hybridization. The paper therefore provides further evidence for the existence of fusion of functions as a distinct syntactic configuration, and indirectly supports theoretical frameworks which treat functions and categories as distinct primitives.

On Palmer's defence of the distinction between auxiliaries and main verbs

Palmer (1979) presents a lengthy defence of the thesis advanced in his book The English Verb (1974) that the English auxiliaries are not main verbs - a defence against the arguments I had put forward in Huddleston (1976) and elsewhere. In this reply my purpose is to argue that there are serious flaws in his defence which, I believe, invalidate it and the thesis it supports.

Some remarks about The 'Cambridge Grammar of the English Language'

It is normally rather unedifying to see responses to book reviews. It smacks of lowrent districts of the academic world such as the correspondence pages of The New York Review of Books, where hot words by furious authors (‘‘If Jones were not a ginsodden mental defective he would see . . .’’) meet cold contempt from unrepentant reviewers (‘‘Smith calls me a drunk and a moron, but that does not save his illwritten novel . . .’’), and it all gets a bit unseemly. It has the flavour of wild hacking at the shrubbery rather than professional topiary work. For the most part, reviews of academic books in scholarly journals are best left unanswered: the answer is the book, and there the serious reader will turn. And yet . . . One has to acknowledge that there are unusual cases. When we first saw (in English Studies 86, no. 4, August 2005) the review article by de Haan on our book The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (henceforth CGEL), published after the book had been out for nearly three and a half years, we were genuinely amazed. A small thing that struck us immediately was de Haan’s statement (p. 336) that ‘‘[n]either the Further reading nor the index is mentioned on the contents page’’. That would be a striking oversight by the careful people at Cambridge University Press, and by us, if it were true. But it isn’t! Anyone can check this by glancing at CGEL’s contents list (p. v). True, the page design gives more prominence in column width and font size to the chapter titles than to the front and end matter; but one would expect the writer of a review article to glance a second time if at first he thought he was looking at a strange oversight in book production. It’s a very small point, but it did raise our antennae. If this reviewer couldn’t even read the contents page at the beginning, how was he going to use the 78 pages of critical apparatus at the end, or grapple with the 1,764 pages of the main text in between? Well, to a large extent he didn’t. The researching and writing of CGEL took a full twelve years. There is a lot about de Haan’s review article that suggests it took a full twelve minutes. It amounts to little more than a brief list of misreadings and careless errors about the book’s content.